


Until Crow Knows Your Name

by drvology



Category: Supernatural
Genre: AU, M/M, old west au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-12
Updated: 2011-08-12
Packaged: 2017-10-22 13:12:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 37,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/238393
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drvology/pseuds/drvology
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam Winchester had grown up riding the range for his father's band of hunters, his brother Dean at his side. He wakes one morning after a dream of a different life to Dean telling him their father's gone missing. They give chase to find him, but in the punishing miles and endless trail, it's Sam that might be lost. [Old West AU]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Until Crow Knows Your Name

**Author's Note:**

> \-- Written for spn_j2_bigbang  
> \-- [gypsy_sunday's accompanying art posted at livejournal](http://lockthecolt.livejournal.com/32818.html)  
> \-- [Fic post at livejournal](http://drvsilla.livejournal.com/654358.html)  
> \-- This is a story I wrote a frantically inspired set of notes for back in 2007. I'm very glad to have finally realized it as a whole.

Cattle--pitiful few that'd survived this scratch of a place to begin with--lay gutted, found wall-eyed dead each morning. Picked off, then picked clean by something no one 'round here could name.

John licked his lips. They wouldn't want the name, either, if they'd any idea.

He and the boys had ridden hard near a week to get here, followed spooked whispers of the folk streaming in exodus from a land cursed. They asked the usual questions--cursed as in blackened, as in inexplicable murders and sulfurous ruin, as in things gone cold and just dead wrong--winnowed the odds from some kinda-mean beast to werewolves.

John figured it for a smaller, foundling pack, up from the Mexico strongholds in search of new territory and better prospects. He blinked, looked around the bare scrub fields and yawning milk glass sky, thought there was a certain irony in that.

A stout man stood in front of the low, sun-bleached house they'd at last narrowed their search to pinpoint, sinewy arms crossed over his barrel chest. Behind him several paces a young girl, maybe fourteen. Pretty enough, with straw hair and pale features washed out under the sere day. Easy to tell she'd been warned to stay away but wasn't keen on listening.

John surveyed and Caleb had already ridden wide, minded their backs, while Rufus and Bobby looked unconcernedly bored at the gaped maw corpses of cows that'd been stacked along the far corral to be burned.

The sweet, rancid stink of them carried on the wind, and the noise of clouding bottle flies made the air hum like a distant train was coming. He'd explained they were here to help, was waiting on an answer.

"You some kinda lawmen?"

John thumbed the marshal's badge hidden at his hip, decided to bet against needing to flash it. People out here were either desperate enough for help or so used to its unorthodoxy when it came, most didn't make a fuss of questions.

He sat a little straighter, met that watery blue gaze square. "Something like that."

John glanced over his shoulder, watched Sam and Dean after it was clear the homesteader wasn't gonna do anything but eye them warily. Dean shifted in the saddle, impatient already, kicked at Sam and they shared a secret grin and quiet laugh.

Nothing doing, there, beyond tightly wound boys being boys, and Dean's compulsion to look after everything Sam and Sam's bright blush for whenever Dean looked.

He hid in the shadow of his hat and shook his head, corrected himself. No, both men now. Sam was past 15, put Dean even further. Might always be his sons, but were no longer boys. Maybe not entirely the best sort with the cleanest years of living behind them, but that would count as a recommendation to some.

John pushed a line of saliva over the corner of his mouth then stuck a thin cheroot there to hang, rolled it over in his mind. He smiled, low and wry, the kind of tooth-glinting pull that made lesser people worry.

"Oh, you keep your daughter locked up tight inside all right, mister. But so we're clear--my boys'll be the least of her troubles."

This lifeworn homesteader had more mettle than John'd given credit, met his sardonic glare without flinching, and not for the first since they'd ridden up, checked the shotgun leaned pointedly against the porchbeam.

"So you know how to rid what's ailing us, you got that know-how?" At his pause John nodded. "Alright, say that you do. What's it going to cost us?"

John hummed, struck a match on his gunbelt, sucked the scorch deep in until the cheroot lit. There already wasn't much more they could do, here, except waste time jawing.

"A night or two's camping on your property undisturbed." At suspicious eyes John quirked a humorless grin. "Take it or leave it."

The homesteader didn't like that. John could tell. Easier to believe in something when it came at a cost, and to be rid of this affliction, the cost paid would likely have agreed to be steep. A gold brooch, their best and only silver tray, one of the last yardbirds. Maybe even a run at touching that sweet daughter.

But none of that was what John and his band needed, and he let that show in his eyes, sure as he'd put an end to this.

It took only a short pause then the man nodded.

"I'll take it, mister. I have the uncanny notion I can trust you, at least to do this." The homesteader watched the ripple of flies disturb when Bobby waved a hand to inspect one of the broken cows. "Don't really see as I have much choice, besides."

John wiped at his mustache, forefinger and thumb spreading wide, nodded at the barn. "Nice bit of paint. Who's the artist?"

The barn had a sizable hex over its wide door, hung like a false moon, probably cost more in colors than they'd put timber into the house.

"The wife."

John nodded. "Tell her to do three more--on each of your hides--something for protection. Starting with her own."

He loosened the reins so his horse would wade a few steps, then leaned close to the homesteader, said low so only the two of them could hear, "If, come morning, me and my men haven't made it outta this alive, all that's left is you and yours. No more cattle to slow 'em another day, and nothing more you can do. Take my advice--you hear them coming, slit your daughter's pretty throat, then the same to your wife, then eat that shotgun--because there's no outrunning this."

The man blanched but held firm, agreed with a flinty nod.

Night was coming, too fast for him to spare any further effort or hollow comfort on this family. Better to make ready and save them than use up more air. He heeled in, charged out into the dust, and motioned to the others.

Dean and Sam were quick to his tail, fell in behind, and it wasn't long before Bobby and Rufus fanned a wider vee past the boys' horses. They rode for the streamer of white smoke Caleb had sent up, where they'd hunker in, decide on their best plan of attack.

John pulled up a couple ten feet from the camp circle, dismounted and started walking towards the fire in an easy, seamless lope. The boys clattered down after him, shoved and roughhoused then hid between their horses. John rolled his eyes, tossed his reins at Dean.

"Make yourselves useful."

Dean caught them easy, winked at Sam. "Yessir."

"This too." Bobby tossed an enamel coffee pot at them, and Sam hooked it with a finger.

They gathered in all the animals, led them to the thread of a creek that forced its way through the barrenness here, likely the sole inducement to stop and try to root in this desolate place.

John watched Sam crouch at the stream, Dean crowded to stand just behind, eyes on the horizon but a light hand kept on Sam's shoulder. He smiled, his last and only comfort those two, their loyalty.

Bobby lifted his chin towards the farmhouse. "Those hexes you said to have her paint--what good'll they do?"

"So far as I know? None." John laughed darkly. "But it'll make them busy, and feel better for thinking something will."

Bobby accepted that in silence, equal grimness and pragmatism.

John nodded, satisfied. "How many we thinking here?"

Rufus joined them, creaked to sit on a flat, upturned rock, slung his arms on his canted knees. "No more than fifteen. They're youngins, too. Tore through all those cows making more of a mess than a meal."

"I say ten. Dozen tops." Caleb laced a stream of tobacco juice to the side, landed near Rufus' feet.

Rufus sniffed in mild disgust but didn't move.

"Fifteen, ten, not much worry either way." John toed at the fire, opened the coals to have a place to set the coffee pot Sam had carried back.

Dean hobbled the horses nearby, leaned on his buckskin's back leg, flickered fingers at Sam then patted the ground. Sam fell next to Dean and curled under Dean's arm, matched as Sam's roan horse chewed affectinately at the buckskin's hide then sleepily butted against the barrel, weighted there and closed its eyes.

John wasn't worried. They all knew how to kill a werewolf, knew how to work together, had faced worse before.

"Let's all get some rest. This hunt'll be on us soon enough."

No truer words.

John was awake and to his feet in an instant, hackles bristling under the mournful howls on the wind. A cold wind, steady and mean. It whistled through the empty barn, carried across the fallow fields.

He kicked the gone-dry coffee pot from dying embers, flick of the wrist to open his gun, counted six silver bullets. Six more waited strapped across his chest, and another two dozen weighed down his belt.

Rufus was already mounted, and the moon conformed to Caleb's shape, fifty paces from camp and riding fast, riding low, all of them up and splintered as if from a crack of lightning at their center.

Dean leaned down, helped Sam into the saddle with an arm-clasped heft. Both boys' horses pawed and anticked spiritedly in anticipation. They waited to cover him, until he'd kneed Bobby from a bedroll into moving faster, and had stepped into his saddle.

At least ten hulking shadows stalked them across the desert, inky and fluid and menacing. It wouldn't be long. John heard their snaps and the skitter of their claws, tasted the upwelling readiness to fight like copper and bile.

John spurred away from the knot of Sam, Dean and Bobby, drew a dagger with his left hand, holstered his gun at a tilt, and aimed with his rifle.

The first werewolf in John's sights stumbled, fell, the second that'd been running alongside eating the distance between them with alarming ease. It circled, snapped, then lunged. Made John glad for his black's long-legged sturdiness and willingness to just keep running. He put the werewolf's eye out with the butt of his shotgun, spun it around his hand, fired.

The bullet went wide an inch, just enough to rattle and burn a sliver of flesh from the werewolf's shoulder. The wolf guttered and growled, brayed.

John gritted, kneed into his horse, crow-hop angled so they could charge. He dug his heel into a flank, leaned so far out his longcoat traced a line in the dirt, slammed his knife past the hilt into the staggered werewolf's chest.

They reared, and John dismissed the wolf to move on to the next. He watched as the powder flare from Dean's gun split the murky night for an instant, used the afterburn that loitered dull and orange as his target and rode in fast. Got there in time for the clouds to open, bathe Dean's neat decapitation of the beast in moonlight, right arm to the elbow slick with blood and a gash on one cheek.

Dean shook off--the wolf's clinging corpse and John's raised hand gesturing in question--wheeled, then rode hard towards the shadowing vein where the valley broke into plain.

Sam's blue was easily recognizable down there, hemmed in by two wolves low in their haunches. Sam fired, wide on purpose, knocked one into the other then his horse threaded the gap, rode to where Dean had charged to meet them.

John couldn't spare them anything more, was knocked sideways from his horse and pinned to the earth, lungs shot of all air and pain burning up his ribs. He kneed, kicked, lodged a spur in the wolf's belly, twisted just enough to listen to it huff and growl after snapping down around dirt instead of John's neck.

Sweat stung into his eye and he boosted onto a hip, strained but couldn't move, weight and strength of the wolf almost to the better of him. He hissed, craned his wrist, then fired through his holster.

He kept firing, unloaded the full cylinder, skin on his hand burning from the powder bursts and the wolf's blood reeking to drench him.

Six in the beast's middle and it was enough to slow it, poison it slower, precious seconds gained so Caleb could appear, wrench the wolf's sideways by its open mouth and fire a shot clean through from the back, past the heart and just to the right of John's head.

"The fuck you doing, Johnny?" Caleb grunted, kept hold of the wolf so John could wriggle free then let it drop in a sickening, wet thud.

John flipped his gun open, reloaded on feel alone, grinned at Caleb. The both of them were gut-streaked and wild, shining in the bright ghostly moonlight.

"Giving you something to do."

"Hunh." Caleb holstered one of his pistols, left his hand to hang so his coat was tucked at the small of his back, tilted his head. "Was getting a mite bored. s'Like you know me or something."

Once John had reloaded he stalked in a tight circle, Caleb backing to him in follow, but there was only the unsettled quiet that descends after a battle's been waged. The fight was over, quick and ruthless as it'd begun.

They walked together towards the others, alert to the smallest thing, found Bobby dragging a gutted wolf to stack on another not too far away.

"Rufus is sealing them in, last rites and holy water, whole bit." Bobby shrugged philosophically. Overkill, sure, but overkill meant whatever they killed stayed dead. "We'll burn ‘em come morning, along with those poor cattle."

John agreed, strode towards the shadow shape of Sam and Dean's horses, found Dean giving Sam a once-over.

"You two all right?" John stepped closer, listened to how their breathing slowed, eased. For him revelation, to them relief and routine.

Sam had a bandana folded and pressed against Dean's cheek. He met John's appraisal, said everything with an unflinching stare and no words.

"We were gonna go dredge ourselves in the creek." Dean turned, shoulder at Sam's sternum, blood on them both a glassy sheen without color. "If that's okay."

Added more as afterthought than seeking permission.

John counted a heartbeat, two, and it'd been ages and too much bitterness ago that he'd remembered to be thankful for this. "Be careful and don't take too long. And Dean?" The boys were only a step away, backs to him already, stiffened. "Keep on eye on Sammy."

Dean slung his shotgun over a shoulder, tucked Sam under the other, and they limped to the cut of shining silver without a backwards glance.

John estimated them at two kills, each, maybe six together. Not bad boys, he thought, slipped a sad grin, retraced to find where they'd made camp. He laid a new fire, lit it then sucked a cheroot burning from it, and the horses returned to circle the camp as had been trained.

He unburdened their saddles, put each to its horn on the ground then chucked bedrolls here and there, kept mark of the moon's arc and the movements of everyone out here--house with its quiet, deadly stillness, Rufus and Bobby and Caleb dealing with the dead, Sam and Dean splashing in the creek.

He waited until the boys had returned, for Dean to make them a nest and Sam to nudge at Dean and complain about the cold until Dean drew them, settled, under the shared blankets. Then he whistled sharply.

"Right here, John. Keep your shirt on." Bobby leaned in over the fire, went from shadow to yellow-bathed, tossed the coffee pot to him. "Your turn."

John caught the pot on instinct, then headed for the creek. He measured his steps, enjoyed his smoke and the satisfaction of a good kill. Once at the water he crouched, palmed his hat from his head and set it aside, dunked his head in the stream. He scrubbed his face, arms to his elbows shirts and all, stayed for a minute staring into dark, swirling eddies of nothing.

He lost himself there, a moment, couldn't stay too long. Shook back the ever-encroaching threat of losing his boys, his life, his mind to this--the most insidious thought of how this had become his mind, his life, his boys.

He staggered to a stand, didn't take any leisure walking back, gun in one hand, filled coffee pot in the other. Dropped it on the coals then dropped down beside, waved for the others to have a wash and a drink. They'd made it through, another job done, another stain of evil lifted from the world's shoulders. Each accepting this is how things were, would be.

Sam and Dean slept soundly, comfortably, not far from the outstretch of his legs, framed by the points of his boots.

John fished rotgut from his saddlebags, saluted the heavens and settled in to wait for dawn, wondered at the cruel irony of being kept alive so long after he was sure he'd found hell to have this be the nearest thing to serenity and contentment he knew.

  


_a feather_  


There was nothing left of what he once might have known.

He could see it through his eyelids, the sere and blood-burnt and heat. Lack of sun and blinding false light, thick greasepaint shadows that weighted the underbelly. Familiar and unalterably changed, ugly reddened scar tissue grown from a razed wound that'd never fade.

The very Earth was charred, blackened and sulfurous, softly insubstantial and forgiving beneath his feet. A rift split beneath him, cracked and skittered and widened as it ran.

Clouds churned overhead, far to either side outstretched, when he breathed and again took this in. Perpetual storms, anvil-headed and pitched, lightning chases in their hearts and sickly ochre-green decay their color cast.

There was a pulse, deadening thrall, kept its inexorable time an undercurrent to everything seething here, all he could touch. Over that, screams and echoes, from the exultant and forsaken both.

This ruined land was his, and his to command.

A touch rested on his shoulder, and he turned with a smile that abruptly dragged into a disappointed snarl. Glowing yellow eyes met his warning without apology or fear of consequence, something like _so proud of you_ hummed on the distortion between them, but Sam knocked the hand away with empty disgust.

He'd expected to see Dean, stood there beside him, the first thought of Dean he'd had in an age. That age ago he'd once been proud of something too, and his anger at it not being Dean pulled like a trigger, flashes of action and dulled memory ringing through him and out into this world.

Pursuing something vital lost while being hunted, he and Dean on their horses running breakneck alongside, the flutter of outspread black wings. Confusion and distrust, Dean's betrayal after the stooping descent into suspicion, the yellow-eyed man finding him and Sam's eventual realization of all this that surrounded them.

There was a canyon, a feather, a tin box. Snake oil in the devil's needle shaped like a gun, and inescapable fire. The curse of heartbreak's sorrow channeled into rage's inevitable temptation, bottle-green gaze gone dead, the promise that all disappointment's tenacity could be shed like a skin.

Sam couldn't faithfully remember beyond that, and when he pushed, the far reaches spread into the triumph of hopelessness.

He hadn't remembered Dean for so long, here in this land that was his. His because--

Those yellow eyes flashed again, closer, hand swept on his cheek, made him forget everything except--

_Because you're a monster._

Sam woke suddenly and sucked in a sharp gasp, sat up straight and he was shaking, snatches of a nightmare clinging to him like the reverberations of a gunshot. He dropped his head and huffed quick, shallow breaths, denied the dream, but all his attempts to calm fled when he reached blindly beside him to find Dean was gone.

Just like in that terrible place, the secret dread that he carried in his heart.

"Dean?" He called, crawled to his feet so fast it staggered him. His eyes burned and he reeked of werewolf guts, cattle bile, blood. It was still dark and that unsettled him, unable to immediately figure out where they were, land his restless gaze on--"Dean!"

Sam tripped against a rock, went down to a knee, continued to scuffle in panic.

"Hey, hey--Sam--where're you going?" Dean laughed lowly, suddenly wonderfully right there, caught Sam's shoulders in his hands.

Sam started to shake harder and he made a tight sound, trapped with fear and relief. He tugged Dean to him and burrowed in.

Dean hugged him tightly for a moment, asked quietly, "Bad dream?"

There was no answer to that, because Sam wasn't sure. It hadn't felt like a dream, anymore than holding Dean to him, solid and stinking of the hunt same as him, as the first reaches of the morning sun crossed the horizon to land on their embrace. Instead, he relied on the warmth of his brother, the cold left from the desert night, how everything between them fit into place.

Sam protested when Dean started to let go.

Dean shushed him. "I'm here, you got me. It's all right." He angled away enough to tilt Sam's chin, assessed the dark circles and lingering fear set in Sam's eyes, raised a brow. "Think you're actually worse off than me this morning, and that's saying something."

Sam couldn't feel foolish, not after standing in and suffering that very real, terrible place. But he found a tired smile and nodded, pretended he appreciated the levity, but unlike Dean growling into coffee and having no choice but to get with it, Sam had no remedy for this ache.

He uncoiled, straightened and blushed, let Dean lead him back to camp. Dean was hiding something, more than the easily discernible worry about what had made Sam so upset.

Sam had been suffering these nightmares, more and more of late, hadn't told anyone about their being visited upon him nor their terror. Dean still knew, at the least suspected. But for the moment Sam let it be, and Dean didn't push back.

He'd run several paces into the scrub desert, was surprised he'd gotten so far after the leadening spook of that dream. Sam decided that if anyone asked, he'd blame the wolf hunt, that he got a scratch, and it'd gotten into his brain thinking it might turn him rabid.

Rufus and Caleb gave him measuring looks but didn't say anything as he eased down onto the abandoned bedroll. Bobby grunted and handed him a used enamel plate heaped with a fresh load of lard grits and beans.

Sam set to it, hungrier than he'd have expected, edged sideways until his leg sidled next to Dean's. The fire was low, burning itself out, everything muted and colorless. Everyone was quiet, carefully so, more than Sam's wrench into wakefulness to upset the serenity that presages dawn.

He shoveled the last of the beans down, took the coffee cup from Dean's hand with a hum and a nod, surveyed the area.

Buck and Blue stood apart from the other horses, ready to ride.

Sam had always wanted to name his horse something grand and romantic, from any one of the heroic books he'd managed to read over the years. Dean had never been fussy, called his stalwart buckskin Buck from the start, add to that Dad's equally unimaginative choice, and the lovely, spindly dark roan Sam rode soon enough was Blue to follow suit. That stuck, despite any other pretension.

He glanced at Dean and wondered if they'd somewhere urgent to go, and why without Rufus' chestnut Jebediah or Bobby's gray, most often called yadamnedmule. Dad's poorly named beast, the big black _Pony_ , was nowhere to be seen, a significant omission from expectation.

Dean was fully dressed, barely suppressed, and Sam knew if they hadn't hunted last night into the hours meeting when the next day broke, he'd have been roused and them going long before now.

Caleb patrolled a walking circle around them, kept eye on the far crag of ravines, the flattening to the west, the homestead in the easterly distance, Colt loping in easy, loose strides. Smoke from the family's morning fire had started to billow thicker to usher in the day, the reeking cloud from the still-burning bodies of the werewolves and cattle hung grotesquely low and clung to everything.

That pile would smolder for another several days. Sam was glad they'd move on before it finally burnt itself down.

Bobby was deceptively nursing a coffee and Rufus looked ready to talk them out of something.

Sam finished his breakfast. Swallowing down and brow furrowing, he asked stickily, "Where's Dad?"

It was the right question--exactly the wrong one--fluttered fitfully around them, unsettled, but wouldn't quite land.

Dean shook his head. "Gone."

The admission was plain, and Sam knew it was absolute from Dean's tone. He understood better than to ask where, wondered about them all still sitting here waiting on something more.

"We don't know he's missing, Dean, he's just headed out before us." Bobby stretched to a stand, took Sam's plate, dangled it over the fire to burn the grease off then he wiped it with a bandana, shoved it into their camp pack. "You know how he can get."

Rufus snorted, not wholly from derision, and he was as lazily in no hurry as Bobby.

Caleb refilled Sam's cup, and Sam watched the coffee grinds from the bottom well through the spout, build up to clog there, saturate then shift away, like sand in the Platte. Caleb smiled reassuringly and patted Sam's shoulder, and he swallowed dutifully and considered things, sucked on the grounds, spit them out once leeched.

He took it in, shifted almost imperceptibly as only Dean would see, take his meaning, get that Sam had decided his allegiance in this, easy. So they'd already argued this with Dean, while Dean had let him sleep. Didn't matter. If Dad was gone, and Dean harbored reason for them to go after, then Sam would go.

More than a few times they'd raised a little hell after a hunt, almost always a glass. Sam liked whiskey well enough, but never as a meal; he'd wake thick-headed but not nearly so bad off as the others the morning next. Dean usually fared well enough too, as much from keeping an eye on Sam as restraint, but since those long nights into woolly afternoons gave them time to themselves, he'd make no complaints either.

Dad lived a step further into the bottle than wanting to wet the occasion of another day survived, and where the others might slip into maudlin recountings or the desire to forget, Dad simply slipped away.

"I do know, maybe better'n anyone." Dean rose to his feet, surety and underlying tension tightening his stance. "And like I've been telling you, he's gone. We need to go after him."

"We'll find him again, son. We always do." Bobby motioned for Dean to settle, then held out his hand for Sam's cup.

Sam blinked, held onto it, stowed in his palm, wouldn't be pacified or see Dean brusquely overruled.

"You don't need to draw sides, here, Sam." Rufus was calm. "Your brother's antsy and overreacting. We'll get on the trail, head to the Arizonas as planned. Your father is--"

Something heavy dropped to the ground between them, cut Rufus off, fell with an imprint and portend far more substantial than its weight.

"Gone." Dean had taken a step closer, hand still open from its throw.

At that Sam knew Dean was for sure right, no arguing, from the instinct in his belly to the proof of Dad's journal, there as Dean's gauntlet.

Their father lived by that journal, a broken man's twistedly born-again bible, slept with that thing more covetously and interestedly than he'd ever taken a woman. He'd never leave it, except to bequeath it and its burdens to his sons.

Sam tossed his cup towards the fire, at that, watched coffee splash out to dance and sizzle before evaporating away as he stood. He nodded at Dean and started to fold their bedding, wasn't afraid of going, leaving the shelter of these other men's company, the already niggling doubt that their father would be found.

"You boys can't just go chasing into the wild," Bobby admonished, stayed seated though Rufus had stood a beat after Sam.

Dean hefted their pack, stared at Bobby. "That's just what we can goddamn do."

Sam retrieved the journal and flicked to the last pages. The worn binding tried to close back on the page he wanted, back to an incantation they'd been forced to remember before Sam had even much learned his figures, or many words. He knuckled the leaves back, creased a line, and starkly floating on the blank page were hastily drawn symbols in smudged charcoal.

Three shapes, representing the devil. Three devils. _Three Devils Gorge_.

Sam curled his hand and the journal thwapped closed obediently. He tucked it into his armpit and rose, folded their bedroll over his other arm. They'd be short on supplies leaving like this, but easier to go and hope for company or a jack rabbit than argue.

Caleb leaned into his heels, watched them a moment, shook his head. "Y'know there's more than running down your old man, out there. More help in just waiting and going with us, finding what you might find along the way. More important things to be doing, too," he added carefully, then hesitated. "I don't like you boys going this alone."

A sudden wind flirted and curled the ends of Dean's duster and he ground on his heel, twisted back to take Caleb, Rufus, and Bobby in. With Sam neatly sheltered behind him a step, he presented a succinct divide. Everything marked from that moment, changed, no going back.

Dean looked Caleb up and down. "This should reckon by you just fine then, seeing as we won't be."

Sam ducked his head and smiled, passed the journal to Dean and Dean caught his hand a touch, smiled back. Sam found his way into his thick quilted shirt then his hat, double-checked Blue's tack and cinch was settled and tight.

Bobby stepped in front of Dean, hand open to Dean's chest. "Goddamnit, just--think about this, for one fucking minute!" He glanced at Sam, said lower, "If nothing else think about your brother, and whatever wild nonsense chase you'll be leading him into."

Dean sharpened with indignation, as if there was anything, anything else that ever came to mind. "If we find him then we'll find y'all again after, easy as you say." He pointedly sighted his rifle, knocked Bobby's arm away stowing it in its strap hung from the saddle. "But, by me, Sam'll be fine."

Bobby threw his hands, turned to implore Sam's better reason, instead. "He's your father all right, but don't go running into what you know nothing about over some grandiose ideas and misplaced loyalty."

Sam tied their bedding behind his saddle and checked his guns, shrugged into his coat that he'd left hanging on the saddlehorn. He turned and looked past Bobby to Dean, already astride Buck and waiting.

"There's nothing misplaced about it, Bobby." Sam nodded curtly, stepped into a stirrup and Blue jittered expectantly. Sam let Blue almost header into Bobby as he reined them towards Dean.

Rufus was still sat by the fire sipping coffee and chewing on a cigarillo. He met Sam's eye, held a moment, did the same for Dean. Their business to go, and not his to say, and on that, finally, there was agreement. Then Rufus fingered the brim of his hat and Sam returned the gesture, kicked into Blue and off they ran, hard on Buck's loping heels.

It was exhilarating, truth be told, and it wasn't mere defiance that ruled them.

They pursued almost due north, had their destination and fair starting place already in mind, rode for it at a fast, sparing trot, unrelenting the whole of the day. The night left them completely still within sight of the homestead, cracked into a cloudless, watery floe blue sky and her punishing sun, more white than anything.

Sam shed layers as the day wore itself into rippling heat, then back into his duster to keep from blistering. He thought about the canvas shortcoat he'd lost back in Montgomery, most of it eaten by the acidic saliva of a beastie, desperately longed for its company now.

Saguaro observed their passage in stoic silence, burrobush and carelessweed tenacious in the cracks between bronzed sandstone rocks crushed underfoot, and the spindly red-tipped reach of ocotillo waving at their passing in the breeze.

By midday they were more than halfway there, dramatic drops and vaults of canyons giving over to rounded buttes and plateaus, bunchgrass and the tannic stain of dead cedar.

They stopped to get their bearings and water the horses at a yucca-infested oasis, softened by periwinkle vervain that scented the air with its lemony phrase, gave the horses something sweet to eat. Sam stamped his boots and stretched feeling into his legs as he dropped from the saddle, loosened Blue's cinch, and Blue let out a long, appreciative breath, tugged from his hold on the bridle to muzzle the standing water greedily.

Sam flipped his hat back, laved the sweat from his brow with the hook of one finger downbent, hair damp and lanked from its spread. He peeled from his coat then crouched in front of Blue, braced between Blue's legs, splashed himself from head to waist. Blue kept patient stead, trained, trusted and willing to watch Sam's back like this without fear of him being trampled.

Dean was tipped in a precipitous, dangerous stretch, one hand holding to Buck's foreleg so he could dunk his head in the water.

Sam grinned, stood, considered going over and toeing Dean the rest of the way in. He settled into Blue's neck, made quiet fun of the other two. Blue leaned back, nuzzled Sam's outstretched palm, sucked at the taste of salt, then he rubbed his head against Sam's side, almost knocked him over.

Sam scritched around Blue's ears, behind, then down to Blue's downy nose, affection as much as self-preservation, smiled when Buck trailed over for the same, Dean dragged to slot in the tight gap left between Sam and their horses. Both animals swished their tails, ears relaxed, provided just a bit of shade and would alert them of any trouble.

Buck grunted, nuzzled at Dean until Dean tucked under his neck, shoulder fit to the curve of Buck's jaw. Buck leaned hard forward, almost tumbled Dean, then the horse seemed to smile and he closed his eyes.

Dean hooked his arm up and back, caught one of Buck's long ears, tickled its ends with the bends of his knuckles. He scratched deep and steady at the smudge flare on Buck's forehead, leaned back into Buck just as heavily.

Sam grinned. "He'll fall asleep."

"Hmmmm," Dean breathed, pushed up at the hips so his legs straightened further, feet planted widespread on the sloped bank. "I'm thinking I just might, too."

Blue swayed to knock Sam back into remembering to pet him. Sam did, wanting for them to have a moment of this content simplicity, suddenly envious of all the years before a morning ago when that's all he'd known to share with Dean. The horror in their lives and relentless task of fighting had always been kept separate, to yesterday, but it'd broken that protective circle and Sam was scared it'd just continue to erode.

"You okay?" Dean lifted one eyelid, clear in not being able to rest with Sam so restless beside him.

Sam could only shrug.

Dean whapped Buck firmly and slipped away, whatever they'd found in moment gone. He searched his saddlebag, handed Sam a thick hunk of buffalo jerky, worked on his own piece while the horses started cropping the verbena.

Sam needed no consideration, not Dean's worry or for his own thoughts. "I'm good." He was, trailed a thumb up the opened button placket of Dean's shirt. " _You_ okay?"

Dad gone missing would hit Dean a lot harder than any way it'd find to bother Sam.

"I'm fine, Sam. We get past Three Devils, see what we find, I'll be better." Dean's bravado was all for Sam's reassurance, and he caught Sam's wrist, flinched as if Sam's touch tickled or disturbed.

Sam flexed then opened his hand, pulled back. "We should probably keep on." He returned to the water, knelt there, saw again how Dean had flinched from him.

He dropped a needle compass in the cup of a shallowed rock, for something to do and as a blind, waited.

Dean knelt beside him, flicked water to tease at his nape and it burned coldly following his spine. Sam grouched, knocked into Dean, grinned into his knee when Dean's hand stayed at his collar while North revealed itself.

The sun drew its line across them, northeast landmarked with a blunted rock castle in the distance that gapped the mouth of a crumbling riverbed long dry. In that riverbed was a cataract, used to thunder and scream wetly when the water'd run, named _Three Devils_ by the tribe who believed it cursed, for the three distinct and deadly whirlpools the cataract had churned. Without the river it was a precipitous funnel into bedrock, and so now a gorge.

They let the horses have a last chance for a drink. Sam stripped, soaked his lightest muslin shirt, tugged back into it then his coat dragged over. He settled in the saddle and fitted his hat, clicked, and Blue sloughed the watering hole and they were once more toiling their way.

Sam watched Dean surreptitiously, easy and sure in the saddle, projecting a serenity and confidence in action Sam didn't share, and didn't quite believe. He wanted to talk to Dean, didn't want to meddle, couldn't wrap his mind around the idea of what would happen if their father was never found.

More than two hours, by the sun and the knot in Sam's shoulders, and the castle was in spitting range. As they angled to weave past the riverbed, the horse hooves began to clop instead of sieve, hardpack and clay taking over for sand. Sam drew up and Blue stopped, gave Dean room to sight the ley that'd lead them the final push.

Telling the boys to go to the gorge was as deluded as anything else their father did by their lives; someone else might know the devil's mark, might realize three drawn together meant this place. Only Dean, then Sam, had been told where to go once the gorge had been found.

Dean looked over and Sam nodded, Blue already whickering and acquiescing to Buck's movements as Dean swung tiredly back into the saddle, the four of them in companionable, vital tune.

Grass began its abundance here, rooted deep, green, yellow-green and gray, kept the ground from running away. The sky widened, more robin's egg now than turquoise, pressed the horizon further down to expand the spread of the earth around them.

Sam recognized where they were, once past the valley and up a rise into rocky hills, and they picked up speed and anticipation. Dean found the rabbit trail and kicked Buck up its narrow spindle, and Blue followed without complaint directly behind. Sam felt hollowed out when, at last, they arrived, brittle and too long in his limbs, too short in his skin, baked through from the sun his flesh was overheated and tender, like being plagued with ague.

They dismounted in the ruin of a drystack barn foundation, old enough and so long gone there was no trace of whoever had built it left. The barn had been cut along the winding lip of a tributary, now only puncturevine and scrub, merciless drought clear having starved them out.

Rubbled next to the foundation was a sloping, defeated silo, its middle bulging on one side and caved on the other, as if it'd been punched. Sam dismounted, threw Blue's reins over the crumbling rockwall, and mourning doves cried and scattered to escape the rotting cross timbers somehow still holding on above as he batted cobwebs and shadows, entered.

He was blinded by the darkness, absolute-seeming after a day of bight sun and reflecting sky, grunted when Dean ran smack into him after ducking inside. His eyes adjusted, and the silo's innards showed themselves.

There were wards and traps painted in whitewash all over the smoothed river rock, one ring far overhead where it could sit, unbroken, link the circumference round. The seams around the door and window had been packed with limestone powder mixed with goofer dust, the ground in the center spiked with staves, hawthorne and elder and bocote, and a wild clutch of sage and angelica root grew wherever stone met earth.

Sam avoided the staves, stepped across to peer and poke in a niche carved into the rock. "What are we looking for?"

He could have bitten his tongue out, for that, unfair and thoughtlessly demanding. Dean knew no better than he did, already felt the burden of responsibility heavily enough without Sam's blundering.

"Sorry," Sam amended hastily, drew back when his finger slicked through something slimy and cold. "I just--it's. I've never liked it in here."

Dean searched the opposite arc of the silo, methodical and wordless as they searched for something, anything, that seemed like what their father would want them to find or out of place to tell them its importance.

In the rock itself were hides, everything John Winchester had collected in his years and wanted to keep safe, or safe from harm's sway. There were charms, hex boxes, medicine bags. Dean whuffed a softly bemused laugh, and Sam glanced over, focused on the small figure in Dean's hand.

It was a pewter soldier, had belonged to Dean then Sam, shared until one day it disappeared. Sam wasn't sure why that, of all things, had been what Dad had seen fit to spare as a relic of their past days, but he couldn't keep from smiling at its find and its memories.

He was cynical enough to wonder if Dad hadn't blessed the thing, or came to believe it cursed, somehow, why it had been secreted here with everything else.

Dean contemplated it then went to set it back where he'd found it, stilled. "Sam?"

"Hmm?" He looked over when Dean didn't answer.

Dean held up a gun. Sam recognized it immediately--their father's favorite. Dad had carried it for years, had worn away the handle to the the shape and reach of his hand.

They shared a troubled look, and Dean tucked the gun into his belt.

Sam leaned a hand against the wall to try and boost to feel along a narrow ledge just above his outstretched fingertips and the rock gave, shifted, inched sideways. He straightened, grabbed hold of the loosened rock and was able to slowly pry it free, behind it the glint of silver and hazy precognition catching the gloomy half-light.

_A tin box._

Sam was compelled to reach for it, to touch it. When he did, fire split him twain, inside out.

Jagged light flickered, jerked, suspended a moment over a horse's skull. Sound rushed and drowned, became screams then eerie silence. A river ford sandbar, surrounding land, sped past in a disorienting blur, arrived at the broken arm of a decaying windmill. The tip of the dragon's tail, star's pinprick pointing the way. Then more light and a young man's sullen face devoid of humanity, thump of warning and shock when his eyes flashed yellow, laughter sharp then abruptly gone, smoking end of a father's gun blue-orange hot like a brand.

Sam dropped the box, fell to his knees, and everything went dark.

He woke lying in the grass under the mild sunshine, shadowed by Dean's hat bent over him, pillowed in Dean's lap. Dean was propped in the corner of the barn's skeleton, refuge from the wind and the silo, shuttered away fear to hide it from Sam, a moment too late.

Sam coughed and Dean tipped him forward, and after a first careful sip of water, he gulped gasping swallows. He curled into Dean's shoulder, listened to the reassuring talisman of Dean's pulse, felt clammy and sick to his stomach.

The tin box sat beside Dean's knee, cold and baleful as if its blankness stared at him. It'd once held tobacco, that label faded, flaked away, hinged lid opened back and a stone weighted to pin whatever was fluttering inside, thinly opaque like silica, creamy white like bleached bone.

Buck and Blue grazed nearby, stood in the opposite corner of the barn's remains.

Sam was desperate to explain, had none to offer, just sat quietly and let Dean hold onto him as the day mellowed into a gloaming sunset of amber skies, gold-tipped grass and prussian clouds. There was comfort for both, here like this, was matched with the foundling disquiet and foreboding that'd been lurking, until now, in Sam's dreams.

Dean didn't push for more, but before it got dark he finally let go, shifted Sam onto the waiting envelope of their bedroll. A bundle fire snapped and popped, burned low with almost invisible gray smoke, enough for warmth and to keep critters at bay, nothing so substantial to alert anyone in the area to their position. Coffee perked while Sam watched Dean mix soda biscuits in their bag flour, water beading and trying to escape the bowled flour as Dean pinched bacon cuts in until it all crumbled to stick against his palm.

Sometimes, Dean simply didn't want to talk about things. This time, Sam was glad to let that stand.

They ate and drained the coffee pot, perfunct and by rote, sat with their shoulders leaned together and couldn't quite meet one another's eye. Sam sensed the pressure of Dean's bitten-back questions and hanging suspicions, was preoccupied with dread of whatever Dean harbored in doubt about him, and his head still pounded from feeling like it'd been cracked completely open in the silo.

Sam willingly let Dean coax him to bed, unresisting to simply close his eyes and sleep, pretend they could forget. He lay tense and shaking and sure this was the verge of some unforgivable ruin, then Dean huffed shortly, tightened an arm slung over his hips from behind, drew them together to share blankets and heat.

Firelight reflected off the tin box, whispers of suggestion, and there'd be no avoiding confronting what he'd found--what it'd induced--when they woke on the morrow.

He tucked back into Dean and tried to relax, then blinked at the sudden finding of Draco intermingled in their canopy of stars, and as Sam slipped into exhaustion he understood at least part of what had been shown to him. He had to follow that long tail to its end, and maybe for the best, without Dean.

***

Sam woke to stillness, a turned-under fire, with Dean and the horses gone.

He threw the blankets back and shoved to stand, startled back a pace when, as he straightened, he came face to face with a huge crow sat on the topmost tumble of the barn's rockwall.

It wasn't alarmed, didn't squawk or even move, regarded him steadily with an implacable, inky stare. Seemed to have been keeping watch, waiting.

Sam braced his hands on the wall, the rock smooth and cool and steadying. He was unnerved, felt foolish for being rattled, muttered a good morning and turned to find Dean.

The crow hopped alongside Sam, sleek and shadowy with flares of blue when the sun glanced its feathers, click of its claws as it skipped rock to rock. They came to the end of the barn and it tilted its head, far right then far left, poked out at Sam with its beak.

"Hey," he reacted, pulled away, then he batted at the bird but it didn't move. Sam changed tactic, twisted and stepped hugely, abruptly, away, was brought down when the crow lofted, beat its wings in flapping schurrs at his face then swooped to dart around his ankles. "Shit, goddamnit, stupid bird."

The crow hovered over Sam a moment, this and that way spins above where Sam had landed hard on his backside, then alighted on his middle, stared up at him again. It chattered, darted its beak to preen at Sam's unruly hair, tugged at the leather cord that held it in a messy ponytail, stole one of the long strands with a sudden tug.

Then it plucked a feather from its left wing, let it flutter to land in Sam's palm.

Seemingly satisfied at last, trade made, the crow blinked and lifted itself into flight, caw-caw-caw echoing as it banked into the warming breeze.

Sam twirled the feather in his fingers, puzzled at it, and when he heard Dean call for him he stuffed it in a pocket and got up, ran to meet Dean returning to him, horses in tow.

Dean tossed a canteen at Sam, heavily refilled, but he knew better than to waste it past wetting his parch. He didn't know how far Dean had been forced to go in search of its source, and by the dew thick on Dean's coat and the horses manes, Dean had been up, restless, and searching for awhile.

In the time Sam had gathered and tied their bedroll, Dean was mounted and ready to ride. Sam didn't even break stride as he approached Blue's head, just grabbed the poll and horn and lifted himself into the saddle.

"I know where we have to go next," Sam said quietly, as if quiet would mitigate his words. He didn't want to offer this, didn't want to acknowledge or tempt fate, but there wasn't anything else he could do. "You can search a different way, if you think that's best, go south while--"

Dean brought Buck around, drifted them to Blue's haunch. "Git on then," he said smoothly, big-brother impatience without real challenge, wariness still in his eyes balanced by a willingness to trust Sam's lead.

Sam did lead, then, bolstered by Dean's steadfastness and the landmarks from his vision that rose before them, then fell behind, as they made their way. The sandbar that allowed them to make easy cross of a shallow but widely swift river, signatures in rock and earth and treestands read unerringly as if familiar. Eventually, after noon had sliced the day into warping heat, a windmill disrupted the otherwise flat, nondescript land.

He and Dean rode in towards it, found it sentry to a homestead with no signs of life, only deprivation.

The place seemed deserted, a forgotten, forlorn scratch in what was more desert than grass, too many seasons overgrazing and trying to turn the rest into tillable yield. The house was the crumpled remains of a soddy, dried out and brown, one corner timber-built with a porch jutting from its open door. Something carried on the breeze, rank and putrid. Could have been desolation, could have been death. Was probably both, worse even.

It was as if Famine itself had rode through, gutted it with its scythe.

Buck and Blue snorted, didn't like it here. Sam felt the same, wariness and unease. He wasn't sure why a vision would bring them to such a place, seemed no promise or answer in any of this ruin.

They dismounted and circled where they stood, got a fix. House north to be ruthlessly blistered every sun up and down, empty corral in the shadowed lee of the barn to the southeast. A windmill spun listlessly, had no more work of benefit to do, squeaked like an animal caught in a trap.

Sam was trying to discern what was hunkered in the barn when a prickling warning spread from his scalp down his skin. When he turned, his breath left and dread cold tingled, not quite fear and not quite disgust, something he couldn't name.

Dean put a hand out, stayed Sam behind him.

A young man had appeared on the porch, glared at them an odd mix of aggression and beseeching, and Sam understood that this is what had baited him here. This kid--looked near the same age, matted curly hair and watery gray eyes in that sullen face from Sam's vision--crackled with energy and wild power, so much stronger than the frightening vibrations that had been stirring to life deep within Sam.

He stepped forward, but Dean grabbed his arm.

"Sam--go check the barn. Let me talk to him."

He wasn't sure Dean understood, about this kid. Wasn't sure he'd be enough to take the kid on, if things got ugly.

"Dean, no. I should--"

"Watch my back and check for any trouble. I'm gonna try to get him outside, away from whatever's in that house." Dean met Sam's eyes, hid them in the overlapped brims of their hats. "Okay?"

It wasn't an order, not really. More a request, threaded harsh and weighty with concern Sam could palpably feel, shared. After a moment he relented with a nod, tapped Dean's chest.

"Be careful."

Dean smiled grimly. "Ain't I always?" He swallowed, then straightened, started to approach the house.

Sam watched, the kid sinking back into the shadows and Dean's steady and slow movements, how Dean tried to be nonthreatening without looking like a target. He could hear Dean's voice, but could discern no words, and the kid's hands flexed. Sam turned reluctantly away and started for the barn.

They left the horses free in the yard, might need a quick getaway.

The sun scorch left when Sam entered the barn, but what he found was worse than that heat. It was airless, stifling, and he gagged, caught his retch in a hand then fumbled for his bandana. He covered his mouth and nose over, stood, eyes watering while they adjusted to the gloom, and he curdled at what revealed.

A pig, a few chickens, torn apart seemingly inside-out, left here to rot and stink for days. There was a buckboard and crude plow, the horse that had driven each bulge-eyed and decomposing under the collapsing hayloft, gutted, ribs exposed. Sam unsheathed his knife, crept across the barn then poked a slat loose to let a slant of light in, wondered at this awful madness.

The light speared the dark, caught floating motes and a bevy of flies, iridescent and rapacious and undisturbed by Sam's presence. He choked another gag back and started to leave, clear there'd be no answers here.

Sam's steps faltered when he saw the corpse, an older man dented in half and still looking surprised, propped in the corner behind the horse. He was fresh enough dead there was only bloat and the start of sloughing of skin. Maybe a neighbor, maybe the life-worn father, Sam didn't know. Didn't care.

"Dean," Sam whispered, instinctive as breathing, and he started to run.

He was thrown, bodily, by an unseen force back into the barn. The door slammed shut and Sam stumbled, buckled at the knees when pain and white seared his brain, arms flying to cover his head when the last pole bracing the hayloft cracked and gave. Something had snapped it like a twig, whip and warp of power, purposeful, same as what had caused every destruction here. Bales and the blooded remains of chickens tumbled around and onto him, the loft floor blocking the door.

The dark horror around him blurred and Sam saw inside the house, instead. Dean with hands spread and placating, the kid red-nosed and belligerent, beyond reach. Sam caught flashes of blood there too, limbs and covered cast-iron dishes reeking, a line of knives quivering on the only table.

Sam saw Dean draw his gun, saw the kid sneer and laugh, watched as Dean inconceivably mashed the barrel to his temple and pulled the trigger.

Sam trembled, then screamed--savage and raw--surge of that wild anger he'd recoiled from and been drawn to in the kid on the porch. He pushed, bodily and with his mind, and the barn blew open, its contents spilling in a grisly mess into the yard.

He shook loose from the vision and clambered free, didn't care what he stepped on or what he touched, clawed hands-and-knees to his feet and ran towards the house, determined to stop what he'd just been shown.

Another gunshot sounded. Sam clutched his heart, cursed and ran faster.

He was on the porch and still screaming for Dean when Dean abruptly appeared, whole and amazing, pushed him right back off the porch and into the barren yard.

Sam wound both hands in Dean's shirt, tugged and begged and Dean soothed, was as shaken and disturbed, and they held onto each other a long moment, the eerie whistling of the wind through the barn's wreck and the windmill's craw their companion.

The rest was silence. Whatever menacing, terrible power that had been here gone.

Dean had him held fast, Sam's forehead mashed into Dean's shoulder, their coats meeting to circle them completely. Buck and Blue had positioned in a vee surrounding them, warm and horsey and reassuring.

Sam shivered and leaned back, looked at the house, felt an urgent pull to go and see. To know.

Dean shook his head. "You're not going in there. Nothing you need." He was pale, drawn, shaken by this for reasons deeper than having been given no choice but to kill that kid.

Sam wanted to argue, wanted to point out maybe this was a harbinger, a sign.

"Nothing you are either, Sammy. Get me?" When Sam didn't answer Dean wet his thumb and cleaned a smear from Sam's cheek, grounded them both. "Get me?"

"I get you." Sam did, understood Dean didn't want him to see the carnage he understood was inside, look at the dismal cut-string remnants of the kid, and what that kid had done to his family.

He leaned back into Dean and Dean let him, laughed weirdly but in relief, and Sam vowed he'd never turn into that. Not with Dean. Not to Dean.

A crow cawed, landed on the pitch of the house. Its call broke their reverie, and Sam glared at it over Dean's shoulder.

"We shouldn't stay here longer," Dean said, still unnerved, but true all the same. There was nothing here for them. "The only thing I could get out of the kid besides raving about his father and some yellow-eyed sonufabitch that'd addled him into this hysteria was the name of a town. Someplace called Pinchbeck. I don't know better than to head there next, give seeing what's there a try."

At Dean's suggestive pause, Sam nodded, no vision to deter them going or direct them elsewhere. The mention of yellow eyes made him shiver, and Dean nodded back, like that's the part that was being asked after as understood.

Dean didn't say more or waste further, just gathered their reins and boosted Sam into the saddle, then mounted up himself with efficient, practiced haste. He paused at the sagging porch long enough to drag an oiled strip of wickcloth from his flintbox. He put a match to it and tossed it into the house.

It was dry and caught like tinder flint, started to go up in a roar. The crow protested and took flight. Sam backtracked, did the same to the barn, prayed for it all to burn and burn until only a black mark on the earth remained. When he went to join Dean, waiting for him at the edge of the property, the crow circled back in, tightening on Sam. It tipped its wings side-to-side, as if to entice Sam a different way.

Sam looked at the pyre of the house, the barn, the final toll in the wreaking from a mind seized by the same power that was taking hold of him. He looked out to Dean, hazed past a veil of clinging smoke, thick and black and caustic, then into the prairie, open and beckoning.

What if he became that kid, _was_ that kid. He loosened the reins, almost unconsciously kneed Blue towards the spread of grass that would take him from Dean, rescue Dean from when--

"Sammy!" Dean raised an arm, hooked it in a wide loop--c'mon.

Sam gasped tightly, made no sound, nodded and kneed into Blue. Blue readily complied, ears back and perturbed, no desire to linger.

The crow called after him, but Sam leaned into Blue and just kept going, broke past the smoke and into Dean's flank.

They rode hard and taut until the greasy, billowing clouds of the fires were obscured from view, lost behind trees and gentle hills and enough distance to blot that grim forsaken place from their sight.

Sam tugged Blue to stop, and Blue stamped when Buck didn't immediately follow suit, gruffing in displeasure until Dean had wheeled Buck around to trot towards them, then pull up alongside.

"What if we don't find anything in Pinchbeck?"

Dean shrugged. "I dunno. We keep riding."

Sam frowned, unappeased but more afraid, of what was happening and the things he'd seen at that homestead, what it cruelly intimated he might descend into and become.

"Is that it? Our whole plan, the rest of our lives? We just keep riding?"

"That's our whole lives now," Dean said harshly, sharp and unkind as Sam had ever heard.

He nodded too quickly, looked away, watched a brace of red-winged blackbirds chase from one cluster of prickly brambles to the next. Sam's breath caught when a crow joined their ranks, huge and familiar, impossibly so, but it observed them intently while it munched waxy, bruise-colored berries from the bramble. Blue shifted weight, anxious under Sam's distress, snapped at Buck uncharacteristically, so Buck shied and jostled Dean.

Dean sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. He took off his hat, mopped sweat and cinder and dried blood from his skin, neck up and cuffs out. He snugged his hat back on, pocketed the kerchief, gaze finding Sam's weary and ragged.

"I don't get that, what happened, what that was back there." Dean lifted his chin towards the horizon, back where they'd left that kid gone so horribly wrong. "How could someone do that to their family?"

Sam shook his head. "He didn't think of them as that--as family. He thought of himself as all alone."

Dean didn't ask how Sam knew that. "Yeah, maybe. But he was just a kid, Sam. That's it. Just--" he quit, there. No reconciling or grappling it, only its stark tragedy.

They had another day's ride before Pinchbeck, should press on, could only allow a brief respite if they wanted to make it there by tomorrow. Still, they remained in brooding silence, heat lightning bursting scatter-shot to fork the marbled sky.

Sam tapped his saddlehorn, rolled his lips between his teeth, then asked in hidden breath, "What was in that box I found?"

Dean looked torn by relief and dread that Sam had asked. He unbuckled his saddlebag to get it, held it a long moment as if deciding what he should do. Then he clicked to knee Buck closer, passed it over, waited to see if it'd jar Sam tumbling into a vision, and when it didn't he let it go.

"Sam?"

He stilled from opening the tin, fingertips poked into the widening vee next to the hinge.

"You're not alone." Dean hesitated, reached over to squeeze Sam's arm.

Sam nodded carefully. "Okay," he sounded out, drawn and unsure from the sadness and apprehension that darkened Dean's eyes, and that shared touch which had never been hesitant before.

The tin was light, barely had presence in his hand. Sam found a thickness of paper unevenly folded, aged and moth-eaten at the creases. The papers showed a collection of symbols and spells, drawn in a precise, neat hand that Sam didn't recognize. A way to devise a chosen weapon into a demon killer.

Beneath that was a scrap of newsprint, top margin torn away, a note from their father.

_Dean.  
When you find this, it's because I've gone to try and prevent the thing that stole our lives away from finding you boys, but it well might not be enough. If I fail, you will need this against what's coming for you to protect you both._

_Even if turning it on your brother is the only way to save him, in the end._

_Trust no one else with it, not even me should we meet again._

  


_snake oil from the devil's needle_  


The riding here hadn't been easy. Dean and Buck always a mite stretch further than could be comfortably spoken to while they picked a trail from the silo, into scrubland that valleyed into wind-flattened prairie. They didn't discuss it, not even to talk around it. Sam was almost sorry Dean had let him discover what their father had warned. The words chased and pestered, wouldn't rest, also couldn't rightly be immediately countered or proven false.

Sam couldn't decide if their father's warning was a truth waiting to be borne out or more convoluted ravings from a man who'd always seemed to hold him in reserved affection, at best.

No time had been wasted with breaks, both in a hurry to put distance between themselves and the homestead, and Sam's visions and breakdowns. As if miles and acres of country could undo any of what had been set into motion. Along the way, a few hours from the silo, they'd shared a look and a bristling sense that they'd been made, something tracking in parallel to them, dogging their every step.

That crow, maybe, Sam had thought miserably.

With that, Sam carried a persistent, low-level headache that managed to shift from behind his eyes, to piercing his temple, to staggering down his neck, just in case he got too used to it in one place and could maybe settle into ignoring it.

Goldenrod grew thick enough in the grass its pollen colored the air, coated the toes of Sam's boots and Blue's legs from their constant drag against the heavy, swaying heads. The wild had been beaten back by the settlers here, and Dean drew in, settled Buck to pace Blue as they started to pass clusters of humanity, then met a road, and followed that to Pinchbeck.

Sam felt it, crossed some invisible threshold, similar in reckoning to the eerie terribleness at the homestead that'd both bent that kid twisted, then been twisted by him all wrong. But here it was milder, controlled, less threatening. It settled and lay over everything here like a mist, seemed to be doing no real harm.

He straightened, met Dean's questioning look, shook his head.

Pinchbeck was as any town other they'd been to, bigger than some, no more distinct. It was marked by a three-story hotel at the center of main street, painted fresh summer yellow with white gingerbread trim. Its placard of comforts and accouterments jutted at the boardwalk overhang, was impressively, almost ridiculously, long.

There was enough bustle and busyness that no one noted their arrival, too much else going on for a couple of trail-weary riders to cause any need for attention. Likely they wouldn't be remarked upon at all, sheriff or jurisdictional ward absorbed in matters more important than seeing if these two dusty fellows were on any warrants, if even they were met in the eye by anyone other than a barkeep.

Despite knowing the power here wasn't an immediate threat, Sam shifted under an ominous disquiet. "I think we were followed here."

Dean scanned the thoroughfare, mostly shrouded by his hat, nodded. "Yep."

They'd keep their eyes peeled; for now, could do nothing more that wait it out, see.

As they approached that buttercup of a hotel-saloon-gameroom, the clang of piano keys and glasses and guttural voices blended in a discordantly familiar tune. Sam whoa'd to slow into an easy halt, rolled from Blue to drop between their mounts. He took Buck's bridle, looped their reins over the hitching post out front, and the horses stamped and stretched

Dean boosted from the saddle, stepped on the post and skipped onto the boardwalk. He smirked down at Sam getting sprayed as Buck lowered and blew into the shallow water trough next to where they'd hitched.

Sam gave Dean the finger, then tightened and re-situated his gunbelt, met Dean by ducking under the post to slither up onto the boardwalk.

Dean held them from going anywhere a moment, crooked close to speak under their hats. "Thinking we should send a wire, see if we can get any help for whatever's coming next." He frowned. "Not sure there'll be an answer, but feel damn sure we're gonna need it."

Over the years, they'd maintained a few known relay stations, compass points in bigger towns, could be checked for messages if the group got split apart by choice or circumstance. Sam couldn't help wanting the help that might arrive--nor the fear for him and Dean if it didn't--given how everything they chased in search of answers seemed only to speed them in a faster, more dangerous run towards things growing far bigger than they could overcome.

"If they'd gone down to the Arizonas as planned, no way they'd make it as far as Kansas for days--weeks. But yeah. Can't hurt to try." Sam smiled. "Maybe Bobby will bring some coffee, seeing as we're out."

Dean smiled back, dimmed by the same worries Sam carried. Sam nudged into Dean and started them walking, and they matched pace so they could shoulder into the saloon together.

Inside, it was dark, slants of sunlight pouring from the three front windows hazed by smoke and hay and dust. The hall was dominated by an ornate bar at the back with an equally fine run-around balcony over top, anchored to one side by a sweeping curve of stairs. Tucked under those was the hotel lobby, complete with button-leather chairs and a fainting chaise. The rest of the room was dedicated to tables, and most of those were full.

Dean pulled an amused face and sidled further in, batwing doors swinging after them.

Habit, silent agreement, and knowing each other so well found them at the bar. Sam leaned forward, able to keep an eye out in the mirror, flicked two fingers at the bartender. Dean turned around, sunk into his elbows propped on the bar, barely any space between them.

They covertly observed and checked the place, for evident threats, avenues of escape, the darker things that can lurk and take a man by nasty surprise. Aside from the energy-thrum Sam felt but couldn't pin, there didn't seem any trouble here.

When their beers sloshed in front of him, Sam slid one over for Dean, kept hold of the mug's belly while Dean closed on the handle, and with the exchange each understood from the other that nothing posed any imminent danger.

Sam was drawn to watching a lone card player at the head gaming table, up a short run of stairs on a wide platform above the main level of the saloon. The man was fancy, to the nines, but there was an underlying dejection and defeat in him, carefully concealed, that somehow Sam could see.

Their eyes met in the mirror, and the dandy quirked a smile towards Dean then winked.

"Ahh, newcomers. Hello!" He didn't yell, quite, but could be heard over everything as if stood beside them.

He grinned and spread his hands invitingly, long-sleeved white shirt with frills at the buttons and wrists held from distracting the cards with burgundy bands around the upper arms. He had on a green-striped vest with a watch fob, burgundy cravat and pocket handkerchief, dark pants nicer than anything Sam had ever worn.

Sam turned from the bar but kept hold of his beer, and Dean slid to close the small gap between them.

"Come on over here, make your welcome. Let me buy you another drink, get to know you." He waved importantly, and the bartender hustled two fresh mugs of beer to his table.

Dean raised an eyebrow at Sam and Sam shrugged. With that they agreed, pushed from the bar and took the stairs, let themselves be shown into chairs across the table from this fancy man.

As Dean lowered into his seat he fished in a pocket, threw two silvers into the ante, one for him, one for Sam.

"Andy at your service, always so glad to welcome new customers to my establishment and town." He started shuffling a deck of cards, was clumsy in the action and kept losing several spit to the sides, gathered them without a worry to reshuffle. He offered the disorderly stack to Dean.

Dean snorted and tapped the top card, pass, and Andy began to deal, had no greater skill thumbing five cards per player than he'd shown shuffling.

"And you gentlemen are?"

Sam was tight-lipped, habit and their kept way, almost gaped when Dean answered fluidly.

"Dean Winchester, this is my brother Sam." Dean's mouth clopped shut and he glared up from his cards, darted an astonished glance at Sam.

"Really?" Sam mouthed, but Dean only grumped and scowled back down at his cards.

"Oh, nice. Good to meet you." Andy rubbed his hands together eagerly once the game had been dealt, turned from Sam to Dean expectantly. "And what brings you to Pinchbeck, Dean Winchester and his brother?"

Dean had already set his hand and was prepared to play, opened his mouth, but Sam cut him off.

"Just minding business that's our own," he answered curtly, kicked Dean under the table. He studied his cards, nothing doing but not a for-sure lose. He tucked them back under-faced to the tabletop.

"Mmmm, I can certainly understand that, being a man of many a business myself." Andy leaned in, patted the table next to Dean's arm. "How about you trade in your three best for these?" he asked, skidded three cards set aside from the draw deck for Dean to have instead.

"Okay," Dean agreed without hesitation, chose three cards from his hand while Sam watched incredulously.

Andy's grin held, easy and syrupy and unambitious. He turned to Sam. "I'll be taking any of your promising cards too, hmm?"

Sam felt the suggestion tug in his gut, its literal work to try and force him to comply. He was able to suppress the instantaneous compulsion, paid for it with an itchy sweat and had to swallow a flood of saliva.

"Sure," he answered carefully, picked the crap deuce and bleeder ten from his hand, kept the eight pair and jack.

Andy flicked a look at the cards Sam had traded in, disconcertion briefly shadowing his expression, but he blinked back to friendly blankness readily enough, waited for Dean to begin the draw.

The hand didn't take long, between his and Dean's shit hands and Andy's insistence on how the poker should be played. He maintained a flow of easy, distracting chatter, nattered annoyingly about the stagecoach schedule and whether San Francisco was reachable by boat from the Indies and had Sam or Dean ever hunted bison or elk from one of the game ranches sprouting up in the unnamed territories.

In the end there wasn't much money lost, so that wasn't a worry, but Sam had watched with great interest and discomfort as Dean was completely manipulated. The whole time Sam could feel the tug, pull, Andy's suggestive energy and leading charm. He pretended to go along with it as necessary, watched as Dean was dragged effortlessly in its tow, but one game was more than enough he'd stomach for.

"Just a friendly game, get things started." Andy raked the pot towards him and smiled. "Maybe now we can get to some real odds, what do you say?"

Dean folded his hands on the table and smiled brightly, matched Andy's grin in a way that wasn't even Dean, anymore.

Sam flattened his left hand on the table between them, interrupted the flick of cards from Andy's deal, closed his other hand around Dean's shoulder.

"I think I'd prefer if Dean get started on the business we've come here for, as it's something that can't keep. But I'll play you another hand, if you like." He gave Dean a push. "Dean?"

"Yeah--I'll." Dean's eyes cleared and he stood abruptly, chair skidding behind him. He shook his head and batted the air like trying to avoid a hovering wasp. "I'll meet you at the livery, Sam. Just, find me when you're done."

Sam almost laughed when Dean stalked away, annoyed and flustered and ornery with the situation after having shaken from whatever Andy had done, then realizing the result. Once he was gone, Andy started gathering the cards slowly, dropped all pretense, and Sam could no longer feel any attempts of influence or nerve-prickle of Andy's seeming, and particular, power.

They sat quietly for a bit, then Andy lifted a finger and crooked it, not long and he had a double shot of bourbon that he downed and a second double-shot to sip.

Sam could now see clear past Andy's facade, the disinterest and disconnect and blank slurriness in Andy's eyes, every movement. There was more than lifeworn sadness or surrender.

"Are you drunk?"

"Somewhere between blind-stinking and fall-down, absolutely." Andy twirled his second glass, then saluted Sam with it and laughed. "Always."

Sam didn't want to know what Andy was hoping to dampen or outright blot away, reached for the deck of cards and Andy let them go. Sam dealt them a game--gin rummy--and they held their cards but didn't play.

"Did he send you here to kill me, then?" Andy showed the first hint of concern or true reaction with that question, had started to sweat and finally looked uncomfortable. "I didn't think anyone even knew I was here."

All Sam could think about was the homestead, that kid, its blight. He curled in disgust and shook his head. "No, I don't believe there was any intention to send me here to find you. He was mostly gone himself."

"I don't follow." Andy rapped his fingers. "Who was mostly gone?"

Sam tilted questioningly. "I don't know, just some--kid. We found him, and, now he's gone."

"It wasn't Yellow-Eyes?"

Yellow-Eyes. Sam paled, senses sharpening and fear tingling at that, all its implication.

"No, it wasn't him, either."

"Then he was probably one of us. Another of ol' yella's failures." Andy finished his bourbon thoughtfully, dabbed at the rim of the glass, then circled it round until the glass squeaked and vibrated. He smiled, no life or warmth in the gesture.

"And don't ask what any of that means, because I've never learned. I just know one day I woke up and whatever I wanted or asked for, suddenly people were only too happy to oblige. When it didn't stop and no one stopped me, I high-tailed it from the farm my father thought should be everything me and my brother could have wanted, wound up here."

"Stayed here, after acquiring all this." Andy spread his hands widely, then flicked his coat lapel back to reveal a sheriff's badge pinned to his vest. "Pretty sweet deal, don't you agree? I'm flush with it, fine as cream gravy."

Sam didn't, because sweet deal or not, Andy was obviously miserable, loathing for everything even though he controlled an entire town.

"You could leave again," Sam offered. ‘You don't have to stay like this. You can come with me and Dean, even. Find yellow eyes, figure out what all this means."

"My gift is telling people what to do. Doing things myself isn't." Andy tossed his unplayed hand on the table. "Staying here is just coppering my bet that nothing good will ever come from this life."

Sam gathered the cards, shuffled them, liked their cool feel and the _schurr-fripp_ sounds they made.

"I knew someone like us, awhile back. He'd been a upstanding gent, a buffalo soldier, turned into a real hard case. Went plum crazed and tore three men apart in a bar fight, convinced they'd been sent to infect him with the devil or maybe try and pull the devil from out of inside him. It was tough to decipher. They sent him up to Yuma after trying to hang him--that rope just broke--kept him downed with horse pills and laudanum, but in the end, finally killed him trying to escape."

Sam furrowed his brow, unease creeping through him at the idea of being hunted, and dispatched, as coldly. "That's... terrib--"

"Nothing except putting him out of his misery." Andy's eyes were hard, and he refilled their glasses. "Talk about mostly gone. Jake, he, well, he gave up a lot to the war, to cleaning up after Indian massacres without being able to naysay all he'd seen. When he got home, was rewarded for his troubles with his momma long cold and his woman longer since abandoning her promise to wait. He wandered aimlessly after that, dire mean and angry at the world.

"I wouldn't know if I could rightfully say anyone deserves to die, but he was too gone to live. Even here, letting me try and medicine his rages and strength with my suggestion, he was barely tethered. He was bound for it--put down rabid included."

Andy spoke with defeated, cynical authority, had no remorse for Jake or his own decline into emptiness.

"Are there any others?" Sam wasn't sure he wanted to find out.

"Damned if I know." Andy drained his bourbon in a throaty shot, pulled a flask from his lapel pocket. "Damned if I care."

Sam neatened the pile of cards he'd been fiddling with, rapped them on their side, then laid them quietly at Andy's elbow. "Can't say as I like you, but thanks for the game."

"Can't say as I like me much either." Andy coughed, humorless and derisive, didn't meet Sam's eyes. "Winchester, that's what your brother said."

"What about it? You know of some warrant, as sheriff you got some duty to perform?"

Andy shook his head. "No. Only that a John Winchester was here, a day or three ago. Paid for a woman, paid for an overnight room, left within an hour of buying them, unfinished dinner still on his plate." He looked towards the bar, as if remembering. "John Winchester hadn't meant to tell me his name, either. Told me if I spoke to him again he'd gut me, and that's the last of him I saw."

Sam wasn't any more welcoming of further conversation, understood it'd be futile to try.

He finished his drink, gladly pushed from the table and left Andy behind, full of as many questions and lack of satisfactory answers as ever. Tasted contempt thick and rancid over Andy's cowardice and complacency.

He stood out front a moment, searched for Dean, then a lift of sparkling laughter snagged his attention, and he looked down the thoroughfare.

Dean, unmistakable to Sam even at a distance, was up two steps that led to a wide-swept porch in front of a clapboard two-story not attached to the main boardwalk. Sam strode quickly that way, read the situation, huffed mildly, wasn't surprised. Dean had found the bawdy house, was gesturing broadly to a small group of its women, and all were enthralled, laughing and liking being able to let themselves be flirted.

It's not that he minded, exactly. Not that he didn't know some of the best information and seedy tellings about a place could be learned from its working girls. But it rankled him, found his petty streak that Dean would leave him to deal with Andy to search for any sign of their father or whatever the hell it was all of them were chasing--maybe chasing them--and this is what Dean spent time doing instead.

Sam frowned, slunk under the awning of a millinery across the way from the cathouse. He crossed his arms and leaned on a post and wondered the best way to get Dean's attention back--shoot, shout, or just go for their horses and start to leave? He didn't see any of the women, had eyes only for Dean, stared his fill since he could.

"The whole idea is you're allowed to go talk to them, you know. No need for shyness."

Sam jerked in surprise, then scowled at having been so caught out. That wasn't usual, and he wasn't sure if he should blame watching Dean or his own tumultuous thoughts. He rolled his eyes and changed position, one that'd look relaxed after being startled but was actually an easier reach to his gun. His left hand dropped to skim the handle of his knife.

"I suppose if looking is all you want to do, that's fine too." The man who'd interrupted Sam's observance tipped his hat, a low-rolled bowler, and he smiled.

He was shorter than Sam, not unusual, hair slicked with a wide part at the left, and his clothes were nice, but what Sam noticed most of what he wore was his smirk.

"See any you like?" he asked, seemed to be staring directly, meaningfully, at Dean.

Sam tried so hard not to blush, felt his cheeks strafe and heat anyway. "I'm just--waiting on my brother. He'll be done shortly and we'll be on our way. No need wasting effort or getting their hopes up going over."

One of the ladies laughed a trill, fanned herself pointedly to tease in reaction to something Dean had said, and Dean grinned widely.

The man hummed, mused shortly, mocking and sly. He reminded Sam of a traveling salesman selling nothing but junk for a treasure.

"Does he leave you to wait on him often?"

Beyond that mien of a huckster, something weirdly familiar about this man, elusive but tangible, made Sam bite back menacing that it wasn't any of this guy's goddamn business. For that, though, he wasn't about to answer. Didn't bother a difference, as the man asked on.

"Do you ever think of going your own way instead? Leave him to wait for once, watch from the wings as you do what you want for a change?"

Sam had, even more since he'd started to become--whatever was becoming of him. That uncertainty and his heartsick fear that one day Dean wouldn't trust him, would side with his father's ringing admonishment, was almost enough to have him answer yes.

Dean stepped off the porch and patted the railing, fingered his brim, sent the women sailing into twitters and leers at something ribald but likely genuine said, then he turned away. They each appreciated the figure he cut crossing the street, tall and broad and sure in the shadow of his long black duster and the shade of his hat.

"You could, you know. Might be he wouldn't even notice, and if he really cared, he wouldn't begrudge you your own chance in this world."

Sam huffed and turned to tell the guy thanks, but that was enough, mister, but he was gone. Sam blinked, and something darkly silky caught his eye, so he bent to pick it up.

He went cold--then hot--as he picked up the inky feather left behind.

Fire sparked his fingers, numbed his arm, roared into his head.

He fell, kept falling, whole world dropping away below him until there was emptiness. A coiled rope, the fissure of water breaking through rock, sticky line of blood. Blue eyes swirled, concealed, blackened.

Bright light jagged, shifted direction, pulled.

A terrible scream, a shot, savagery in its wake. Things green burnt down, curling in, dying with breathtaking rapidity to cinder then nothing. Green eyes swirled, flared, yellowed.

"God, fuck. Sam! C'mon."

He came to, knelt on the boardwalk, Dean ahold of his shoulders shaking him hard. Sam tried to answer, croaked pathetically, couldn't even see straight. Dean hauled him to stand then, ducking into the nearby alley, leaned him against the wall, hidden from view.

Dean was spooked, outright, that much Sam could tell. He felt it in Dean's touch, Dean's restless eyes on him, Dean's pulse and breath he swore he could feel.

"Sam? What--"

Dean never got to the question, and Sam would have no answer, was still reeling when he heard the swift hasp and weighty click of Dean's draw. Sam squinted past the pounding in his whole body, glad for one of Dean's hands still planted firm on his chest, traveled the length of the other raising that drawn gun at a lanky figure coming towards them from the backside of the alley.

"Whoa now, easy boy. Is that any way to greet a friend?"

Dean tightened, tilted to put more of himself in front of Sam, then recognition altered him, relieved that tension like a cut string. He holstered his gun, fisted in Sam's shirt a moment then patted and let go.

"Caleb--you son of a bitch. It's good to see you." Dean slapped Caleb's shoulder.

""It's good to see you boys, too." Caleb grabbed Dean's wrist and nodded, then he studied Sam speculatively. "Saw your troubles, out front, put me in a hurry to let you know I was here, instead of tailing you past town. You all okay?"

There was no hiding Sam's pallor or how out of it he still felt, but he smiled tightly, more a grimace, tipped a shoulder. "Nothing but Dean's awful biscuits and getting cooked by this sun too many days."

Caleb was unconvinced, let it go. "We should talk, catch up, but not here. I don't trust here." He speared a look down the street, then between the single line of buildings where no one stood, seemed suspicious about it all. "About your father, everything."

Sam frowned, wondered if Caleb sensed or knew something about Andy, wondered if that meant Caleb might grow to be suspicious about him, after sharing company again.

"You've heard from him? Seen him?" Dean asked urgently.

"Like I said, not here."

"Uh, sure." Dean licked his lips, a stall. Didn't like this, but that was something only Sam would see. "Got somewhere in mind?"

"Ride outta town west, you'll see a stand of dry birch. Take the bend that wraps them, and I'll meet you there, get us along." Caleb twisted in place, heel of his hand on the butt of his gun, and he'd already started backing away.

There wasn't much choice in letting Caleb go.

"You heard him, let's get on. You can ride?" Dean didn't waste time waiting for an answer, nudged Sam along instead of like moments before when he'd held Sam, made sure to be there for Sam.

"Yes," Sam answered unnecessarily, annoyed and confused, and he hated that, just like that, Dean would snap to attention for Caleb, for someone almost like Dad.

Sam wouldn't get dragged unceremoniously simply to follow orders, to follow Caleb. Anger seared through him, from deep in his gut, anger that was his here today and his from his dreams, those nightmares, anger at Dean and all of this.

He dug his heels in, made Dean stall up then stop. "This is bullshit. Caleb shows up from nowhere, talks to us for a minute, and off you go?" He threw up his hands, frustrated and suddenly rife with fury. "It's always been like this, for Dad, for the _hunt_ , for whatever next he expects us to kill. And now, this time? It's worse, because it's for him but he's the one who left. He's the one who disappeared."

Dean hooked his elbow, forced him along, past the passersby who'd started to linger and gawk. He pushed Sam between their horses, manhandled Sam into climbing the saddle.

"We've been doing nothing but giving chase, riding somewhere else, feel like we're losing time but are already too far behind. What are we even doing? Where are we? Do we know?" Sam tugged Blue sharply into main street, heedless of anyone who might be in his way. He kicked in, sped them to dart in a burst away from Dean, and for a fleeting moment thought of that man's words and that yes, yes he probably should just run and keep running away.

The questions and demands were as much his own, his anxiety at how everything was irrevocably changed, never be any going back, even if they found Dad and went back on the trail, and it all settled back down to what it'd once been. Because he was different, and Dean knew it, held it against him. Feared him, even if Dean wouldn't admit it.

Sam rolled forward to give Blue less resistance, wanted them to run and run, but it didn't take long for Buck to catch them. Blue bested in sprints, but Buck had endurance, ran steadier and faster over any distance.

Dean reached Sam's reins, let them run until completely clear of town, then slowed them enough so they could talk.

"We don't know, Sam. But here we've just sent a maybe-hopeless wire along in the narrow chance we'll get help, and Caleb finds us? I'm thinking he might know something, and it's worth trying to find out. Especially if it's about Dad." Dean shook his head.

Sam's nostrils flared, something Dean hated. He didn't quite do it on purpose.

Dean sighed in a low hiss. "I'm tired too, tired and angry and wish there was just something I could shoot or burn down, fix this. But so far, all we have is chasing this, and running to the next thing. I'm sorry I can't do better than that. I'm not just running after Caleb blind though, believe you me--'cause like I said, he did very conveniently just happen to find us."

Quick as that, cruelly as that, Sam's anger died and was gone, replaced with remorse and a dull ache. Sam took Blue's reins from Dean's offering them, nodded and apologized with the look he gave, the willingness to trust and follow. Tried to hide the clamoring of every fool wish he'd give over just as willingly to Dean.

Buck slid into an easy gallop when Dean leaned to the brace of his neck, and Sam stayed close without crowding, no complaint or held petulance when they curved the birches and Dean checked on him.

They spotted Caleb up a rise at the mouth of a dirt canyon. He motioned them to follow, spurred Colt into the lee of a shallow that'd been carved by wind and time in the earth, created a jetty plateau with a gentle, grassy slope meeting its western edge and a precipitous drop over to its east.

Caleb stood waiting for them, patted Colt in permission to go graze. Colt stamped and jerked at the light touch. Dean didn't dismount, so Sam didn't either.

"All right, we're here. Talk." Dean swept his coat back and tucked it behind him, then with deceptive casualness let his hand drop onto his gun. "You can start by telling us why you've been following us so long, without so much as a howdy before now."

Caleb raised his arms, placated Dean's suspicion, glanced at Sam. When their eyes met something flickered, a darker, more sinister power, made Sam doubly wary. Sam tilted Blue into a protective stance, told Dean with that he didn't trust this either.

"I've only been following you to catch up, Dean. It took the better part of a day of arguing Bobby and Rufus that we should come after you, help you boys, before I gave up on them."

"You leave your crucifix and protection gris-gris bags with them, too?"

"Aw, now Dean, why you have to be like that? I'm a friend, being a friend."

Dean was intractable, and Sam wasn't swayed by Caleb's imploring.

"Boys, what are you doing. There's no need for this."

" _Christo_ ," Dean intoned, low on a growling breath.

Caleb threw his head back and started to laugh, and Sam shifted, unsheathed his knife. When Caleb straightened, his eyes had gone completely black like obsidian.

"Your daddy's boys, all right, through and through. But before you do anything to me, at least let me put your mind at ease, tell you where your daddy's gone." Caleb grinned, toothy and evil. "He's in Hell, and he likes it there. Feels right at home."

Dean side-stepped Buck, enough so Sam could see that in a minute, they'd run, Blue just behind the line Buck had cleared, then both of them down into the canyon.

"You know, I was told by a pastor once that demons only lie. I think I'll take his word, instead."

Caleb just kept laughing, tsk'd them softly. He swatted Dean from his horse to crunch into the wall, closed a chokehold around Sam's neck, all without having touched them or even moved other than to flick his arms.

Sam gasped, fought against the tightening pressure. He tried to wrench away, get a glimpse of Dean, was already swooning and bright, hazy dots started to cloud and dance past his vision.

"All I wanted was to talk. I just needed a few questions answered, a few things from you. But no, gotta make it hard. Supposing then I'll just kill you, at least get what I want from your bones."

Sam continued to struggle, clawed at the invisible hold on him and to keep from falling off Blue. He tried to concentrate, to summon what had let him blow that barn in two. Caleb tightened down, and Sam was helpless, running out of breath.

A shot broke, and Sam was released. He wheezed, listed far to the side. Dean staggered up beside him and patted his leg, leaned heavily on Blue, muttered a short incantation Sam couldn't hear.

Caleb was sprawled on the ground, eyes still blackened, bled from the neck. Dean had shot to stun--whether on purpose or all he'd been able to manage--and the prayer seemed to be holding the demon paralyzed.

Sam kneed Blue and they backed, gathered Buck, held him while Dean swung into the saddle.

"Out here, even hours from now when the buzzards swarm, we'll be able to see it." Dean lowered his aim, and Sam started when he fired again, this time a ragged, awful gutshot that'd kill for sure, but be long and painful in its arrival. Dean spit, feral with scorn and protective fury. "I'm gonna enjoy that."

Buck jerked into a run and Blue swiftly followed. They crossed the plateau's spine to get clear of that place, made for the gap that descended east.

Sam let out a long sigh and they slowed just enough for Dean to smile and nod, for Sam to smile back. Then Dean spurred and started Buck into a run, had to get away from here and Caleb's tainted shell.

A roar split over the sound of their escaping horses, and the canyon wall above splintered, exploded, boulders and rocks and debris tumbling to rain down, collapse into the gap and rush like an unholy river burst its banks down into the valley, cloud of dust and dread billowing as it all settled to land on where Dean and Buck had just run.

The world went silent, horror and sheer panic deafening Sam. Blue reared, knocked him to the ground. Sam staggered, then stood dumb and wide-eyed, stared at the immensity of the landslide and the havoc. He imagined Dean under it and there, finally, the power in him stirred, began its rage.

"I know this demon thing is new to you boys, but really. A weak prayer and a few bullets?" Caleb crouched from one of the boulders, looked down at Sam. He had one hand to his middle, pressed the slime and mess of guts to stay in, stinking of offal and shit and blood, smirked then sucked his teeth.

Sam took a step back, then a second, and Caleb straightened slowly. They stared one another down.

"I want the plans for that gun your daddy bartered for. That ain't all his soul was worth, but it's the only thing worthwhile to me he traded for. Then I am gonna kill you, like your brother, but it won't be quite so quick. Yellow eyes might have wants for you, but we don't. If we get that gun, you're good as dead, and better to us that way." Caleb smiled narrowly, lifted his free hand, scratched a finger in the air.

Sam felt that scratch prickle over his cheek, hot and acrid, but it was dulling, receding. He'd gone numb, anger and torment for Caleb killing Dean finding terrible, uncontrolled consequence.

As Caleb started to leap from the levee of rock, Sam unleashed. He screamed, grabbed hold of Caleb in that vile, noncorporeal way he'd felt--learned that quick by its feel--reached the hooks of his fingers deep inside and started to twist, pull, and burn.

The demon screeched, tried to fight back, but Sam's rage was far too strong. It overwhelmed them both, white-hot and without mercy, and Sam could do nothing but let it act its will. He could barely harness it, but that didn't matter, not now, was enough that he could hold this thing--this fucking demon thing--in his hands, turn it to cinder, then ash, then crush that ash to nothingness in his hands.

When the last of Caleb was gone, Sam's power faltered, lost focus, and he fell to the ground. Landed in a heap, a crater gouged around where he'd stood. He curled in on himself, dazed, panting and wincing in pain as feeling returned to his limbs.

Sam managed to flop onto his side, saw up into a break that revealed the calm, porcelain blue sky and its adorning lackadaisical clouds.

He hadn't just killed that demon--he'd sliced the very rock away.

Sam crawled and clambered over the strewn, densely packed earth he'd rent in a violent cut, boots slipping and fingernails scraping under. He topped the heap, dug his heels and slid down into the canyon, endlessly searched for any sign of Dean.

The damage was worse on this side, gravity and weight and the narrowing of the gap forcing the slide higher, had run it faster and deeper. Sam despaired being able to rescue Dean if he was under any of it.

Sam ran along the dangerously unstable peak of the escarpment, gravel and dust tumbling with every step, then a boulder gave and brought him down with it.

He choked and was pummeled with debris, tried to keep his feet, eventually rolled shoulder-over-heel to land at the shallow canyon's bottom. He coughed and staggered back up, hands flat first then arms extended, locked his elbows, pushed until he could make his body stand.

Sam listened for movement, groaning, anything. He stilled, stared at his hands until they stopped shaking, made himself calm and quiet enough to listen for more. Past the roar of his panic and thundering pulse, past the whine of the wind that continued to lift and push rock from the canyon lip, past the rage he'd felt at Caleb, the terror of losing Dean.

There he found it, bare and elusive, but one weak thread was enough, and the more determinedly he pulled it into him, the stronger his hold on it became.

Sam pushed to the far alluvial crest made by the landslide, hands-and-knees climbed over its farthest reach of loose, powdery silt. He toppled to the other side and there, thrown clear of the leading edge of the slide, lay Dean.

Now it was Dean's heartbeat overpowering Sam's senses, steady and sounding like always, like salvation. Sam crouched to Dean, starting to wake and grumble, helped Dean sit up, caught his sudden tipping lean. He pulled with his power, with everything he had, begged and drew Dean back to him.

"Oh, God. _Dean_." Sam laughed strangely, relief and sudden weakness downing him, and he collapsed into Dean's shoulder, pressed his hand to Dean's chest to be able to feel what he still faintly heard. "Shit."

He breathed in Dean's scent, the sour snap and telltale copper of fear and blood. Sam closed his arms around Dean, pulled in, feathered a kiss at Dean's neck, a second, risked a third, this time at the dimple below Dean's mouth.

Dean hummed, patted his side, and the strangulating ache in his ribs began to subside.

Sam peeled Dean's hat away, caught his jaw, tipped him this way and that checking for injury. Dean was sluggish, still patting Sam's side, unseeingly and dazed. He had a slow-seeping gash sliced through his eyebrow, not long but deep enough, a blood-red bruise behind his ear and was filthy with dust.

Sam waved his hand in front of Dean's face, didn't like that darkening goose egg. "Can you see all right?"

"Yeah, I'm fine."

Sam snorted. Of course he was.

"Sam?" Dean squinted, fumbled for then closed both Sam's shoulders in his hands. "Are you okay? What happened?"

Sam got them standing, manacled Dean's wrist and dragged Dean's arm to bend around him, half-carried Dean a few lurching steps. They sat again, heavily, on one of the larger rocks that'd made it this far.

"Caleb," Sam said, shook his head. "Well, that thing in Caleb. But--it's dead now. Really dead."

Dean didn't press for details, nodded and left his hand to rest at Sam's nape, seemed to be finally waking up. He frowned, went suddenly rigid and alert, hand tightening its hold.

"Where's Buck?" Dean's voice cracked and he leveraged against Sam, stumbled and cupped his hands to his mouth. "Buck? Buck!"

Sam went around the boulder field to the other side, trying to find or feel Buck to no use, pushed so hard to try to do so he felt something pop then tickle, reached up to wipe the sensation away and smeared blood into a knuckle that had started running from his nose. He twisted his arm, scrubbed at the blood with his cuff, grimaced and kept searching.

When he'd circled back with no luck, he came upon Dean abruptly, knelt in the rubble a good ten feet from where Dean had landed.

Dean held Buck's head in his lap, tears he likely wasn't aware of coursing muddy rivulets along his cheeks. He traced tender lines along the sooty black surrounding Buck's eyes and freckling smudges down Buck's muzzle.

Buck snorted, blew bloody foam when he chuffed, tried valiantly to answer Dean's soothing, heaved terribly and whined when he rolled, struggling to stand.

"Easy, easy. Whoa," Dean murmured, patted Buck's neck, chamois and sleek under the fringe of Buck's blood-tangled black mane.

Sam's breath caught and anguish tore through him. His hand shook and he wanted to reach for Dean, wanted to be able to do something--hurl the rocks from Buck away, fix this somehow--but there'd be no comfort or changing this.

Buck's front legs were a ruin, one angled grotesquely, the other with its once strong bones protruding past his buckskin hide, cracked in two at the femur. Dean kept patting Buck's face, traced the long scar under his jaw, scratched his ear in the way that always made Buck chortle and lean in for more.

"Goddamnit," Dean breathed, tears thinning and tapering into dry, hollow misery. He leaned in, rested a moment with their foreheads pressed together, shrouded Buck's face with his hands.

After a minute, Dean nodded resolutely and straightened, thumbed the fringe of Buck's long eyelashes and eased Buck's head back to the ground. He drew his shotgun from its akimbo in the leather bracer under the saddle as he stood, cocked it, rested the barrel just beneath Buck's trusting gaze.

Then Dean just kept standing there, swaying, Buck's labored breath beginning to rattle painfully.

Sam stepped forward, then, snuck a hand under Dean's coat and clutched at the small of Dean's back, pressed his shoulder in to support the kickback that'd knock when Dean fired.

Dean nodded again. He muttered a goodbye, maybe a prayer, pulled in a long breath and held it. Took the shot.

The report racked to the heavens and warped the length of the canyon, returned to them on a snapping, mournful echo. Dean didn't react or move, stared at the wreck of his horse and the wound just made. Finally Sam pried the gun from Dean's hand, tapped it to lean away from them against a rock, and Dean lowered slowly, closed Buck's still bright, golden-brown eye.

Dean's stillness started to build tremors and he began untacking Buck, motions quick and jerky, fumbled everything until Sam covered his hand when it curled around the cavesson. Sam did that part, gentled the halter and bit loose, while Dean saw to his saddle and gear, tossed it all to one side.

They stood in terrible silence, after, and Sam wasn't sure if he should leave Dean be or even what he could do.

"Fuck!" Dean screamed, ripped into their silence. He flipped the rifle in his hold, swung the butt overhead, brought it violently down to hammer one of the boulders crushing Buck, once, twice, a third time.

Dean's breath hitched and he staggered, then he spun tightly and hurled the rifle, far as it would go. Sam could hear air catch the barrel and whistle, listened to it clatter down into a ravine that intersected this canyon, knew there'd be no retrieving it.

Sam understood better than to leave be, now. He clamped down on Dean's frantic movements, wrapped his arms around Dean, like Dean had always done for him.

Dean shook, shock from everything that had just happened more than he could contain. But he only let Sam keep him a minute, not even two, before he was pulling back. Sam could veritably see Dean tamping it down, away, beneath resolve to keep going and brutally stubborn stoicism.

Sam kept a hand on Dean's neck anyway, thumbed the line of Dean's pulse. He tested a finger at the cut in Dean's brow, frowned when Dean hissed and tilted away. Dean's thumb slipped into Sam's palm, motion to easily curl back and remove Sam's prodding, just held it there instead.

"We should clean that," Sam warned, more wanted to prolong allowing Dean to stand, rest, stay here with him like this.

"You say Caleb's dead?" Dean scanned the surrounding upper edge of the canyon, something to do, just in case.

"Yeah."

Dean nodded. "Good." He licked his lips, tongue pushing into a cut at the corner of his mouth. He backed a step and his expression shuttered. "Want to cover Buck with these rocks. Can't just leave him out here. Then we'll find Blue. He'll be waiting on you and, with that, likely Colt's hedging close enough to be coaxed out."

Sam's temper flared and he got stubborn, stopped Dean from leaving. "Dean, you're allowed to be upset. To take one minute. You don't have to be so strong all the time."

"Who said?" Dean asked starkly, stared until Sam dropped his hands. "And we don't got time or the luxury of anything."

Dean stalked away, used up his anger, the anguish and helplessness over Buck, as they saw to their grim task. It didn't take long to bury Buck's noble bulk, half-buried already. Once done, Dean didn't hesitate in leaving, shouldered his saddle and tack, Sam the rest of Dean's gear, and they climbed the jagged mound of rocks and uprooted trees back out again.

Blue waited for Sam where the trail had been dramatically split to fall into the canyon. He whinnied softly and Sam curled his fingers around Blue's nose, shook his head.

Dean's prediction for Colt's behavior proved out, and Sam leading Blue to graze mesquite and sage closer and closer to where the paint had hemmed in drew the shying horse to them, desperate for company and reassurance, unwilling to outright flee, not trusting going any nearer the aftermath of the landslide.

Sam looped the reins up so they wouldn't catch in Blue's step, let Blue wander as he and Dean waited on the horses to greet, before slowly approaching themselves. Dean worked calmly, smoothly, removed Caleb's tack then rubbed Colt down, talked a flow of nonsense while Sam climbed onto Blue, let them step and walk around, circling Colt closer in to see if he would balk or spook. He didn't, huge brown eyes wary but no longer showing their whites. Riding under a demon couldn't have been easy.

Dean talked louder while he saddled Colt, even-toned but pitched higher for Sam to hear.

"From the little I could gather from hearing talk in Pinchbeck, it was clear there's trouble brewing in what should be a boomtown gone suddenly bust for reasons no one can cotton. A place up north called Mag--"

"--nificent," Sam finished, stammered after he'd spoken. He hadn't been aware he knew there was a Magnificent, up in the northern stretch of the Kansas territory, but the name was on his tongue easy as that.

He thought back, concentrated, then a tunneling rush surrounded him and he replayed a flickering series of images made known to him while he'd crushed the demon inside Caleb.

"Oh."

Dean just looked at him.

Sam offered a weak smile. "That demon knew. While I was killing it, after I thought you'd--" He stopped, abrupt and ashamed, didn't want to say either aloud.

That Dean could have died. That Sam nearly went mad and, in that, had some dark gift that let him snuff a demon.

"You remember anything else?" Dean had finished tacking Colt, had moved to stand with his hands cupped at Colt's nose without quite touching so Colt could get the scent of him, start to build the calm reciprocity of partnership and trust.

"There's a cemetery near Magnificent, that's where it came from."

Dean nodded. "I know abouts where Magnificent is. Dad took us to that cemetery once. He made us keep out, took rubbings off the tombstones." He shrugged with a half-smile. "We haven't been that close to home since...you know."

Dean gave the saddle an experimental tug, then stepped up, didn't notice to mind as Colt jittered beneath him. Sam felt the weight of meaning resonating behind Dean's simple words, simpler said in casual tones, just nodded back like this was a normal conversation.

"Caleb was protected. He always wore more hex bags and sigils sewn into his clothes than even Dad. If a demon can ride him, probably can get to any of the folk in Magnificent. We're gonna have to protect ourselves with more."

Sam gently nudged Blue to a walk, glad when Colt settled in to follow.

"We should build that gun, too. We'll need it." Dean kept his reins loose, one hand resting on the horse's neck to maintain soothing contact, let Colt rely on Blue as much as his own guidance.

Sam grimaced, thought of the oozing bile and bowel stink from Dean's gutshot in Caleb, no difference to the demon inside. Thought about black eyes and blacker power, having to end that power before it was too late.

"Need it for me?"

Dean glared at him like he'd gone stupid. "Need it so I have something to kill demons with too, Sam." He kept a brow raised until Sam relented with a nod.

"We can use Dad's gun." Sam's mouth pinched. "He left it for us in that silo for a reason. Never have understood much about him, don't have anything to go on for what he's doing now, but that, at least, I was able to get, pretty clear."

Sam wondered at the cruel irony if things twisted enough that his brother would bring him down using their father's favorite gun.

They slipped the canyon's far rim, put it behind them.

Dean drummed his fingers on his leg. "I figure we have enough to pay a shop for its time, and depending, to look the other way. We'll stop somewhere we haven't been."

"Dry Gulch is close enough to make it if we ride overnight, enough west it'll pull the scent off the route to Magnificent, not so far as to be much out of the way," Sam offered.

"Yeah. That'll do." Dean tucked the heels of his boots into the stirrups, stood briefly, checked around as if to find whatever had been tracking them, led the demon in Caleb to them. "Seems there's probably something on our tail, but not sure it can be helped. This whole time looking for Dad it's as if we've been tracked, and easily so."

Sam closed his eyes, flash of yellow upending the natural darkening. Blue protested and whickered until Sam came to again and loosened his punishing hold on the reins.

It was him, him leading everything bad to them.

He met Dean's eyes and Dean knew it, too. Reached out and tugged Sam's hat further down with a teasing smile, not angry or concerned other than they stick together and figure this out, like always.

"I've been wondering, since then. Can you do that?" Dean clicked Colt, practiced them rounding this way, then that, eased the paint into the feel of him.

Sam frowned. "Do what?" The look Dean gave was enough to tell him. "No, I can't." Sam hid his face, rounded a shoulder, the dark terribleness he feared in him licking at the edges of his awareness, the fear that Dean would come to hate him bleak at his core. "I wouldn't use it on you, even if I could, I prom--"

"Oh, I dunno, I sure would. Get you to clean the guns, sharpen the knives, bake me an apple pie." Dean nudged Sam's leg with his toe. "Can't always be all bad."

Sam caught Dean's wrist before Dean got away and separated them to ride. He held on, tried to convey more than could probably ever be said. His thanks that Dean wouldn't just see _monster_ in this, in him. Hurt with the shared sorrow over Buck. Frustrated confusion from Dad still so inexplicably gone, seemingly without concern for either of them. Understanding of the heaviness that had to rest on Dean's mind and heart.

Dean folded forward, surprised Sam when he pulled his hand free and opened Sam's, pressed it flat over his heart. He closed his eyes, breathed deep and slow.

After a second, longer breath, Dean patted Sam's arm then reluctantly drew away. He backed Colt to split apart from Blue's haunch, squared resolutely and clicked with his tongue, then on they ran.

They arrived to Dry Gulch in the long, lightening minutes before Dean's protracted estimation of _dawn_. Sam pulled up, stood on a bluff overlooking everything, and Dean drew next to him, close enough their boots knocked. The town was hushed, church at the end of main street the only distinguishing feature, all the rest a run of huddled buildings attached by a boardwalk and the scattering of saltboxes behind either side.

It was cold with an endless wind droning, riding as if bad trouble nipped its heels, someplace else to be or perpetually chased. High grasses furled and rippled, its ocean a stemmed tide where it met the road at either end of town. In the distance, south, Sam could barely make out the last of the buttes and slopes they'd picked their way around the night through.

Sam flipped his collar to meet the lowered angle of his hat, hunched into his coat and snuck his right hand into his waistband, let it warm while the left lost that gained heat just as fast.

"Too bad there's no time for coffee." Dean smiled, whatever humor attempted not catching his eyes.

Sam dug a packet of horehound from his bag, tossed it at Dean.

There was nothing to do but wait or ride in, and by unspoken agreement they waited in silence, watching as the first streamers of sun broke the horizon and tickled shadows to slant past scrub, make a grand, ominous double of the church, turn the road into a dark gouge.

A greasy cooking fire's smoke showed itself as the sun crept into the world, scudded over the town and beneath the clouds, the only sign of life. The relentless wind gained a degree, two, and the air started to prickle with the warning of a hot day to follow. Down the boardwalk, just visible, someone scuttled out and made for the other end of town. Dry Gulch was awake, well enough.

Dean kneed Colt and Sam easily kept in stride, Blue following without any urging, and by the time they rode towards a low-set hitching beam, more folk had stirred to their daily business. They dismounted, casual and quiet and no one paid them much mind, by rote settled their horses.

Sam nodded behind them, the blacksmith shop at the far edge where the boardwalk dropped, and Dean nodded back, made for the jail nestled in the wings of the churchyard.

The blacksmith's wasn't promising, as much a tack shop as anything. Sam rested his hand on the butt of Dad's gun, its bulk holstered and unfamiliar at his left hip, tip of the barrel clacking now and again against the handle of his knife. He cupped his other hand on the window and peered inside, could make out a wall of dangling horseshoes and unfitted bits, a well of shadow in the center, and the sun just caught the leading edge of a counter. Sam hoped it'd do.

Dean's boots clopped dully, without even checking Sam knew who it was, that stride and rhythm and set. Then Dean shouldered next to him, pressed to the warping glass and their hats combined to reveal a bit more of the inside.

"Got the horses some feed, already water there waiting. No wanted notices for us here, not hung or in the drawer. Sheriff's asleep in the only cell. Keys are on a hook and his gun's on the floor, so don't figure he's had much to be concerned about, of late." Dean sounded satisfied, relieved.

It was always a nuisance and very real concern. The Winchesters and their gang were wanted in more than their share of jurisdictions, some warranted some not--murder, desecration, grave robbery, outright robbery--the usual. It wasn't too tough skipping the law, but that meant you had to keep ahead of it, and they paid heed that they always were.

Sam tried a short knock on the door then they waited, leaned against the boardwalk railing and loitered calmly, Sam watching the store and Dean opposite watching the street, appearing deceptively unhurried and relaxed. Dean tipped his hat to the few townsfolk that happened by, and Sam ignored the cramp of hunger when a whiff of bacon and hash scented to them on that undying wind.

It was full-up day and they'd stood a handful of minutes when light flooded the smithy window. Sam tipped forward and squinted into the window again. A big back door had been swung to, made access to the forge and work area. He whapped Dean's arm and poked a thumb over his shoulder, and Dean followed him to an alley then around to the back without question.

They approached cautiously, no wanting to spook anybody and trying for leadingly optimistic. Sam stayed a step behind Dean, took stock and checked for trouble so Dean could make their entry. Over the years and desperate places they'd willingly gone, Sam had developed a knack for feeling a place out. If his hackles bristled, the others trusted that foreboding.

He got no bad sense of here, only hard-bitten wear and determination.

Sam pressed an open palm to Dean's back, gazed out towards the horizon a hand on his gun just in case, all the same, but Dean read him, relaxed an increment.

"Morning," Dean called, fingered the brim of his hat, charmed a wide grin.

The smithy looked up from stoking the coals, lingered meaningfully at the shotgun leaned nearby. "It is," the smithy answered, circumspect but not fully unkind.

Sam blinked and Dean made near believable turning a cough of surprise into a grunt of acknowledgement.

The smith was a woman, around Dad's age or a few years on, pretty enough and sad around the eyes. Most of what'd make her womanly was hidden, lost under serviceable necessity of her broad-brimmed hat, loose trousers and thick workshirt, and a wide leather apron. She gave them a once-over, knew how to measure them as equally as they had here, frowned at Dean then shrugged, motioned for Sam to come on inside.

Dean grumbled. "I'll wait here." He'd already started poking at everything, seemed on the hunt for something specific.

Sam rolled his eyes but turned with a genial smile and put his hat in his hands, ducked into the shop.

"Was wondering about hiring the shop for the morning, maybe into lunch." Sam kept that smile, guileless when she hummed noncommittally. Sam licked his lips, watched her open the register and make notes, maybe ticking this and that from an order list.

She wasn't interested if what they wanted to make themselves was already on her wall, and any mundane repairs was clear she could do with them at their leisure in the hotel or the saloon. Sam looked outside, unconscious half-smile finding him easily at seeing Dean, downbent and assembling what they'd need without having waited for anything more than they'd said it was to happen.

Sam decided lying past this point wouldn't be worth the breath, had a feeling she'd know the bullshit when she smelled it. He crossed to the counter, set the gun on it, patted it softly with a reverence and wistful disappointment that didn't require much acting.

"Well, ma'am, this was my Pop's, and he's just passed here recently. It's not working like it should, and my brother and me--" Sam tilted his head back, outside, furrowed his brows appealingly. "--we think it should."

"You boys know about that?" She looked up from the gun, met Sam square.

"It's one of the first things Pop taught us, almost sooner than we could walk." Sam smiled proudly and showing that conflicted pride hurt, because it was true but terribly so, proof of their father's obsession and their unforgiving lives at its beckoning.

She hummed thoughtfully then picked up the gun, and Sam didn't stop her. He and Dean had already set it to bait the trap. The chamber fell out immediately, the trigger action snapped horribly when it was pulled, the inscribed pearl on the handle rattled on the threatening verge of falling away.

"This was your father's? And you say he's now passed?"

Sam nodded, kept nodding.

"Hmmm. I'm sorry for your troubles." After a moment she aimed the gun towards the light flooding in through the front window, saw easily it'd fire wide. "How'd it get this way?"

Sam shrugged, brows and hands flying up appealingly. "Found it like that, in one of Pop's boxes after he was--gone." He swallowed, hesitated like that was hard to say. "It's one of the only things of his we have left."

"So then, it's rather important in that, isn't it."

"Ma'am, yes ma'am." Sam clenched his jaw, curled a fist, suddenly hard to talk about and have her see.

She took him at his word, because on all this his word was good, and Sam tried not to show his more mercenary relief.

"Tell you what. You boys help me ready for the day, work on the stack of firewood that needs splitting, and we'll come to an agreement about what you owe from there. I'm pretty good caught up, so I don't mind sitting a long spell out front while you make that right." She narrowed on Sam. "And I'll be damned if this doesn't take you into tomorrow's lunch, but, I'll be the one shown otherwise I suppose."

"Thank you, ma'am. That's fine, just fine." Sam was glad he hadn't been made to cast further for thicker lies or sincerity.

"You can stop with that, long as you're here. Name's Ellen." Ellen carefully set the gun on the counter, covered it with her hand then pointed at Sam. "Get started on what I need doing first, then you can have at."

Sam considered her, looked at the gun, followed her lead and willingly left it there. He nodded sharply and started outside, when she called him to stop short. Sam's posture changed, readiness and tension, but Ellen only smiled.

"Easy now, son. It's alright. Just gonna ask your name, see if you boys wouldn't appreciate coffee and biscuits."

Sam made a long breath leave him slow, blinked. "Sorry -- it's been a long few days." He wasn't all that apologetic. "That'd be real nice, and I reckon my brother's about to eat whatever he can find at the moment, so biscuits and coffee wouldn't just be more than welcome, it'd be a benefit to you as well." He darted a look out front, and his eyes landed on their horses, still the only two tethered in this early morning. "Name's Colt. Samuel Colt."

"Alright, then, Mr Colt. You go tell your brother the terms, and I'll be back with that breakfast."

Ellen was nice, nicer than she'd let on at first. Sam didn't blame her. That's how living out here had to be, most times.

He stripped from his coat, hat, the long-sleeved buttoned layer shirt, rolled up his sleeves on the second, put them on a peg hung just outside the back door. Dean stood waiting, hands on hips, had a length of thin iron leaned on one leg.

"We're agreed." Sam found the woodpile, long maul and short axe in a cutting stump alongside. "She's wanting a bit in trade, then money after seeing what we use." He pried the axe, started to shave curls from the last hunk of wood Ellen had left from the day before. "If you do the splitting I'll do the tindering--faster that way then we can get going."

Dean stripped down too, revealed the glint of a knife at the small of his back, hair brighter and burnished by the sun. Sam was caught, motionless and staring, until Dean kicked at him to tease, almost enough to keep him from blushing. Then Dean started in on the pile without question or complaint, trusted the bargain made by Sam was best as could be for them, didn't really mind the work.

Sam did the fussy parts because Dean did mind the tedium, and he wouldn't argue not having to do the back-breaking side of this. They worked together, easy and in rhythm, said only a few things here and there because between them, not much ever had to find voice. By the time Ellen delivered that promised coffee and biscuits, they'd put quite a dent in carving the longstacks down into manageable burn wood.

Ellen clucked happily, laughed while they scarfed down the biscuits and drained the coffee pot standing there, no need for ceremony of finding a seat or anything more. They stacked their plates and Sam dunked a bandana in the water, wiped his neck and face then passed it to Dean, and Dean tailed it in a pocket and took up the maul again.

"I think that's a fair start, boys. You just get started on the rest, and if the forge eats more than you've cut into for me today, you can finish with doing more." Ellen meant it, and it was fair, but she also had a concern in her tone and a soft spot hidden somewhere in her starch. She nodded, then pointed at various spots around the workyard. "All the tools are here, then the bellows, and I get water from Heyfield's well -- up around the church then back near ten feet." She toed the red painted bucket, and more paint flecked away as she did so. "They'll know it's for me seeing this, so don't be shy about getting more."

Sam worked the last few hunks of wood down, figured to finish outright, but Dean didn't argue, thwacked the maul into the chop stump and started setting up to work.

Ellen watched them awhile, less and less reliance on keeping that shotgun within reach, decided after all that and now them settling determinedly to the task they weren't gonna be trouble. She took the plates, porcelain like Dean said they'd once had but Sam couldn't remember, the pot enamel like every other Sam had seen, and left without a word. A bit later just as quietly brought more biscuits and coffee.

Dean heated, hammered and bent the length of metal into something Sam wasn't sure of, but he was more sure he wasn't going to ask and be overheard. Likely it wasn't something that should be shared, and Sam didn't want to raise suspicion that Dean wasn't doing as expected, or as he knew. It had to be important, because Dean didn't waste effort and sure wouldn't waste the money on this if it weren't. Sam shrugged, dug in the pockets of his coat for dad's journal and the sheaves of fading paper he'd folded inside, propped the instructions for fashioning this demon-killer to one side of the toolbench, then he broke the gun down and began.

Sam carved the handle first, quick enough with a hammer and the spike of a square nail, then he worked on filing and shaping the bore. The heat that'd tipped its hand that morning made good, turned the air to a swelter, and while Sam was grateful for the low-slung awning that saved him from the sun's direct punishment, he more than sweated through his clothes.

He drew practice runs on waxpaper, snuck looks at Dean, shirtless to the waist and keenly competent to the task, a combination of sights that'd never failed to tempt Sam. He tried not to get distracted for long. Ellen more or less left them be, puttered whatever it was she had to do, watched them without seeming too intrusive.

When Sam was finally satisfied that everything he'd need on the gun would fit hidden in embellishment and fancy, he coated the paper with lead powder and transferred the design onto the gun with a scribe, scent of its brass warm in his nose and against his hand. He did one side, then the other, particular with the inscription then added his own flourishes, sigils and symbols, all the while listening to water hiss and Dean hammer, curse and breathe.

Sam ached by day's end, cords strung tight between his shoulders and a piercing throb behind his eyes. It hadn't taken into the next lunch, had taken until near dark, but Ellen hadn't hurried them or shown Sam wrong, just checked without interfering, offered advice when asked without doing more than exactly that.

They'd barely stopped for breaks, no luxury for such, drank ladles of the rust-flavored water and distractedly ate the pork steak, cornbread and honey Ellen had brought them. Sam managed to chatter with her when she'd sit with them, had dinner at a much more leisurely pace, listened as Sam spun superficially to what their life had been among a few outright lies.

Dean added a bit, here and there, mostly played the taciturn older brother beset by grief and the burden of a younger brother. Not a difficult role to assume, and Ellen--not one to be taken in--believed every moment of it.

Sam stopped for a stretch, the bullets all that was left to finish, and he groaned appreciatively when his back popped like a pocket cinder. Dean was done with his own pursuit, sat patiently breaking the gun back down and cleaning its last inch, while Sam had moved on to making bullets.

Ellen took notice of the bullets, didn't question them.

"What made you want to do this?" Sam asked, offered a friendly smile and no hesitation, as if to smooth over the strange wrinkle of needing special bullets to go with a specially altered gun that, supposed, no one'd ever use again.

"Absolutely nothing." Ellen shrugged, an economy of gesture that spoke of a lifetime. "I think you know well as I do. Out here, if you don't fight to stand right back up after getting knocked over, makes it that much easier for the devil reach up, take you down."

She folded her hands, fingers stained save for a paler band not as darkened by the reach of work and wear and sun. Sam imagined a wedding band kept in a jewelry box, hinged and wooden and simple, a hasp forged right here when it all was new. She'd wear it only when in the tiny apartment that jutted to the side of the shop, despite lying to sleep and waking each day alone.

Sam looked over and Dean had sought him back and Sam bit his lip. "Yes ma'am," he said quietly, maybe the most meaning in that exchange as he'd passed all day.

When they had about finished Dean started cleaning up, stowed the tools they no longer needed, loaded another stack of wood next to the open fire and its coal chamber. He nodded wearily and Sam understood, bent over the last of the bullets, while Dean skidded into a shirt then went to get the horses and any necessary supplies.

Dean had put the gun perfectly, neatly back together, and Sam wasn't disappointed when he tried a few dry fires. He wrapped the gun in oilcloth and packed the bullets in a belt. When Dean returned with Colt and Blue, everything was done, including whatever Dean had made that stood cooling in the water bucket, and they made ready to ride.

Sam was gritty, filthy with sweat and cinder, and they both stunk of smoke and iron.

They settled up with Ellen, paid a healthy share of their reserve but it'd been worth the price--for the work, the food, her undemanding company. Dean took the gun, and Sam the bullets, and Ellen saw them onto their horses without a handshake or overmuch sentiment.

"Ma'am." Dean lifted his hat into place, had slung the clothes he was still too hot to wear over the saddlehorn, and they ruffled in the wind as a sharp sliver of moon cut the horizon past his shoulder.

Sam paused before mounting, made a last look of a place he'd liked and figured never to return. "Thank you, Ellen."

"Nothing to it." She smiled, still with that sadness but no weaker for it. Sam kicked into the saddle and he and Dean rode away without a backward glance, Ellen's thoughtful stare seeking after them.

They had full canteens, flour and salt, most importantly the gun.

The diminishing sun's reach cloaked around them as they made into the country, Dry Gulch falling away behind them quick and nondescript, soon lost in an evening fog low to the ground and day's dying light. It got colder quick as the sunlight faded, and Sam shivered, buttoned into his second shirt and considered his coat, while Dean stayed steaming in an undershirt.

Dean scanned around, all compass points, wasn't convinced it'd be this easy. Sam knew the feeling. Something was still out here, waited on them, watched. Something more had joined that, restless and aggravated, jangled against Sam's nerves and their prickling attentiveness.

"There's someplace we can go for the night, protect ourselves and the gun. It'll take an hour, maybe three, but it's worth pushing there." Dean rolled his upper body and winced, clearly bone-tired as Sam felt. "No place else we won't be vulnerable, and no sense dying after all that work." He watched for Sam's agreement, then set Colt to a smooth trot.

Sam wanted only to sleep, to crawl into the curve of Dean asleep beside him, but seemed likely as anything they'd never find living rest again. He urged Blue along, apologized for having to run again so soon. After they'd hit stride Sam rocked in the saddle, found a comfortable slouch, Blue getting them along while he considered the prospect of a quick nap.

He'd given up on--forgotten--asking God for anything years go, but Sam found himself praying the gun would work, and for the strength to kill anything in their path that could be felled by it.

Sam dozed for awhile, half-aware, now and again shifting or pulling center again when Blue moved too sharply or Dean thwapped him back upright. He yawned hugely, blinked and took in the stars that'd crowded overhead, enough light to see despite the crescent moon having already disappeared. He tapped Blue faster, wanted to catch Dean, tell Dean to take the turn resting while he kept watch.

Wanted to check on Dean, too, because something didn't quite feel right.

As they closed in Blue started to huff and loop, tossed his head and whinnied anxiously. Colt answered, stumbled briefly, and Sam sensed with growing alarm the same menace of whatever it was spooking the horses.

He stood in the stirrups a moment, to straighten and try to peer further into the darkness, then eased down ramrod straight and drew his gun. He flanked to Dean, left and out of the sweep of Dean's ready shotgun, and the world seemed on the edge of a breath or a scream.

Something howled, coming hard and fast behind them, was joined by others to their opposite side. It was no coyote, and wolves--neither kind--hadn't roamed these parts in years.

The dark seemed to wrap tighter in while the stars vaulted higher away. Sam jerked Blue to vee angled abruptly from Colt and they sped forward, he and Dean racing so as not to get snared in a tightening noose, ground churning and giving way beneath the grind of hooves now at a breakneck run.

Whatever those things were howled again, Sam and Dean fast losing ground. Sam heard their chuffs, wet thrashing snarls, exhilaration as much as fear wresting the air.

Sam brought Blue dangerously close to Colt, painful rap of their knees, and he passed his bundle of bullets to Dean. Colt strained then snapped briefly, agitated and not wanting to have this, but Blue ran gallantly on.

"Go, keep going, don't know where we're headed!" Sam yelled, grimaced when they hit a rut and kept charging almost blindly on.

Dean took the bundle, didn't like it, but fit himself to Colt's neck and dug in with his spurs. "Stay close, Sam--we're almost there!"

Sam fell back enough so Dean had a precious second, maybe two, and so Dean couldn't argue. Only Dean could lead them, useless to do otherwise. If nothing else he could buy Dean time.

Sam stretched his arm and tugged a rein with it, and Blue went reflexively, circled them a tight arc back towards whatever was hard on them. He paced so he'd be the first, distraction and bait between their pursuers and Dean, but still able to let Blue follow Colt without hesitation or confusion.

Behind him, then alongside probably not but a few dozen feet past his reach, he could hear savage growls and the screech of things powerful, relentless and sharp against rock and sand-laden dirt. After futilely trying to pin or feel to know what was on their heels, Sam gave Blue his head, closed his eyes and concentrated, started to feel out a picture of what was back there.

The sound of them, the rippling energy and unnatural warp of wind around their presence, their gain and gain and gain of impossible speed--none of it was human or earthly or even sane.

Dean drove unerringly forward and Sam followed as prairie gave way to rolling sandhills and clusters of scraggly trees. Something lunged for Dean, snapping and grotesque and visible to Sam only as a blur of nothingness and distortion of the land. Dean's shotgun flared, dead-center to that blur, barely registered as Colt heaved and the beast closed in.

Dean fired again and Sam felt breath, heat and sulfur and threat of the pack as it started to hem them in. Dean wove, was momentarily lost to Sam threading a copse of wind-bent cottonwood. Then Sam knew. Hellhounds. He and Dean were almost out of time.

Sam tried to summon what he'd done to kill that thing in Caleb, sputtered and Blue dove sideways, barely escaped being brought down by one of the hounds, agile and lithe in contrast to the beast's pell-mell brute force. Its weight collided with the earth, dug a furrow several feet deep and even longer, and Sam tried to channel his fear, his anger, his rage, tried to be able to do something more than run.

As they continued on, the hounds began to hesitate, were giving up on their pursuit of Dean, focused on Sam. The threat wasn't the same--Sam understood that, without question--they'd eviscerate Dean, deliver Sam, but to what or whom he wasn't sure.

Those yellow eyes flickered in his mind's eye, found him, and Sam bared his teeth, sliced his arm sideways and shouted, "Keep running, Dean keep running!"

The hound at Dean's side faltered, just enough push from Sam to allow Dean to slip its grasp, and Sam grimaced with triumph and almost the last of his energy spent.

Blue ran them up a short, blunted outcrop, plunged down the other side without pause. Dean had pulled up, and Colt stamped reflexively, sheen of sweat-thickened breath visible in the silver-yellow under the cold stars. Sam felt it when he and Blue crossed, some boundary, invisible and incremental but a chasm in divide, and the hellhounds crashed to a halt, then guttered and howled while Dean waited for Sam.

Dean smiled grimly, violence emanating from his very being, glared into the dark at the frustrated hounds, kept his shotgun leveled true. "C'mon on, Sammy. A bit further in, then we'll make camp." Dean tugged Colt to shy backwards, then after a moment wheeled them away, satisfied the hellhounds would be held. He glanced at Sam. "You all in one piece?"

Sam holstered his gun and sucked wind, nodded, had only enough left to stay his saddle.

That was enough for Dean.

They continued into the night, Orion keeping watch as the visceral bray of the hounds muted, until Dean found what he'd been looking for.

In the dark it was flat, gray on darker gray, though by day it wouldn't be much livelier, a stretch of land overgrown with rib-high grass and the tinny burble of a trickling spring, just enough to damp the rock. The spring disappeared back into the ground several paces from where it escaped, just enough rock to go with its inexorable damp to create an overhang where the water had shallowed a curve years and years gone.

Dean drew up, landed solidly next to Colt, wordlessly hooked Blue's reins. He hobbled the horses right there, helped Sam from the saddle, stood a second until Sam no longer swayed. He scratched the horses' noses and sides, rubbed them down best he could, held their jaws in the cup of each hand while they bobbed and sucked at the shallow run of water.

Sam staggered to his feet, stumbled to the spring font and closed his lips around it, drank greedily until his stomach ached.

He grunted when Dean's hand smoothed over his back, turned around and caught Dean's arm, shook them a bit just to be sure. He listened to Dean breathe, tingled with awareness and fatigue and the elusive tremble of his would-be power, dormant and pacified so long as Dean was whole and within reach.

Dean wiped his chin with the back of his hand, settled onto his heels. "I thought we'd have more of an advantage than just the gun, outright. That has to be what they were after--but at least we've got it."

"No," Sam denied. "They might know we have the gun, but they wanted me. They were coming for me."

"Sam, shit, c'mon. You don't _know_ that. We just got finished making a gun that'll kill whoever it is they work for, and we're riding to do that very thing. It's not--"

"It is, Dean." Sam stressed, tightened his hold on Dean's arm. "I felt it. I'm the cause of this, all of this, somehow, and I'm what they're after."

Dean huffed, gave Sam a firm shake, but already didn't argue. Sam despaired it, because even before his protest, Dean had known that too.

Finally Dean hauled them to stand, glared into the dark surrounding them. "Fine, then. Let them try."

"Dean," Sam chided, wanted Dean to understand, that this was more than a bully or a week left to themselves or a gunfight to cover Sam's back.

"What?" Dean tugged Sam's elbow, wouldn't brook it, whatever all clamoring in Sam that both realized but that didn't seem to matter to Dean. But he sighed, brought them close for a moment, said stern and true, "I hear you, but whatever you're thinking, it's not gonna happen. Not while I'm around."

Sam closed his eyes and nodded, wanted nothing more than to unashamedly, unreservedly believe. He went with Dean to the high ground above the mouth of the spring, the best place to pitch camp.

He gathered the few things they'd want from their saddlebags, crooned and thanked Blue and Colt for a job well done, laid out a tucked together bedroll on the upwind side of the fire Dean struck a spark to start.

Dean made sure it'd caught, crouched close and blowing over the kindling curling and reddening then mellowing to that sustained orange-blue that meant it'd keep burning, and burn deep. It flared enough for Sam to have a better look, and he tipped all the way back to get lost in the endless sky then dragged down, down, fell to the earth and the minute disturbance their presence and foundling fire made against all of that.

"Where are we?" Sam shrugged from his coat, let it fall, let his hat land on top of it. More wanted to know what stopped the hellhounds, and why, because for his efforts, he knew he hadn't been strong enough to force their surrender.

"Dad brought us here, and we stayed for a time. After--after the fire. It's not that far from the old place, and for awhile he didn't know what better to do, but at least he thought we'd be okay here." Dean spoke in that faraway nothing voice that meant everything said hit close, and hit hard. "He made me promise to remember it. Once a few years ago he even made me find it on my own, just in case."

Sam clenched his jaw. Dad didn't know _what better_ back then because he'd been near madness.

"Dad sent you with Caleb, told me there were skinwalkers, that we had to track them from both sides. You were gone almost a month, Dean. Did Caleb even go with you?"

Dean stared into the heavens, the shimmering band of the Milky Way. "Doesn't matter, Sammy. He was right in making me learn it, and that's all that's important."

There was so much in that answer, wrong and right and everything Dean was--what Sam had become thanks to Dean--and something crimped in him at the futility and honest measure it represented. He couldn't argue it, besides; Dean could be hard and inflexible as Dad on some things.

"Salt deposits ring here, miles around and miles deep. There's a mine further west, where the earth isn't anything but salt." Dean sighed, smiled knowingly, didn't drag deeper. "Here, there's enough to keep anything away, not so much it's tainted the water or the land."

Sam didn't want to be impressed, not being so exhausted, from their flight, their day as ever bent to their father's will and task, after learning yet another cost this life notched in their souls. Still, it reassured him, enough so he made himself move from the solid comfort and warmth of Dean to start tending to their needs.

He chewed on the day's earlier biscuits now stale and wandered for firewood, found a smaller tree gone a season ago sagging and tipped, easy enough to kick over with its rotted roots and spongy trunk, broke it across his knee at the thinnest, then leaned it on a rock to step on and break the rest of the way.

He tumbled his find next to the campfire and Dean grunted, added to of the smallest logs, those that'd bring the most immediate heat. Then he got up, wouldn't look at Sam watching him as he got something that he'd strapped to Colt's left stirrup, brought it back to the fire and set it to rest in the coals.

Sam recognized it as what Dean had made at Ellen's. Shivered watching Dean bury it in the blue-orange coals, enough experience and prescience to allow he was getting a good, apprehensive idea of just what Dean had made, and what it'd be for.

He watched the fire as the metal heated, slow tapping as it expanded, and Dean continued to ready. Gathered water, doused a few rags with it, started to set up around where Sam had made their bed, everything in a line--whiskey, water, dry poultice.

Dean wrapped the twisted ends of iron that stuck out of the fire with one of the wetted rags, raked at the embers, lifted so they could see the other end starting to glow with captured fire, put it in and added more wood so it'd stoke hotter.

Sam swallowed rapidly and his stomach churned.

"C'mere, Sammy." Dean squatted next to the fire and patted the bedding, and Sam hesitated long enough for Dean to get up, cross to find him. "It's this or chance what happened to Caleb. Lesser of evils," he smiled humorlessly, "but at least this one's survivable."

Dean undid Sam's hair, wild and unkempt and almost out of its tie from their past ceaseless days, their escape and run from the hounds. Sam reached out, habit and compulsion, felt along the leather cord that held Dean's amulet.

The leather was the same--in his hair, around Dean's neck--gotten years ago when Sam had given the amulet to Dean.

Back when Bobby had a _mercantile & sundry_ and a reason to keep it, they'd been visiting, staying off Dad's badly broken arm from a hunt, ultimately successful but gone awry. Sam had stared in the store's glass case, mesmerized and awed by the brass face and its strange exoticness, certain it had to be important and imbued with magic, meaning. He'd tried to ask about it, but Dad had been even brusquer and tighter back then, hampered further by laudanum and ill-temper from the arm, hadn't the patience or ability for a little boy's foolishness.

That night after dinner, Bobby had brought the amulet to Sam, wrapped in brown paper and tied with the long leather cording. He'd said put it somewhere safe, that it was just to the magic and meaning as Sam would need it to be, and not to bother his daddy with it no more.

The safest place Sam knew was Dean--Dean's arms, Dean's scent, Dean's heartbeat--and the next morning when no one was awake but the two of them, snug in their cot in the back storeroom, Sam had given it over, not even a thought it should be his instead.

They'd fitted the cord to a length Dean liked, and Dean had flicked his knife, cut its ends. Then he'd grinned and done Sam's hair in two pigtails, tugged on one to tease, pulled Sam in for a hug and a so-quiet thanks, almost disbelieving of his own worthiness of such a gift.

Bobby had seen it later that day, had never said a word. His store had burned down a few years later, and nothing left, he'd made his life riding with the Winchesters.

The cording had lost its color, once black and fine, now dull and something like grease and dirt and perfectly careworn. Sam continued to finger its twist, all the way to the amulet, and Dean finger-combed his hair back, tied it tightly in a low ponytail.

Dean always did that when he wanted Sam to take something seriously. When he worried that long, flyaway hair would get snagged or in the way. When he just wanted for them to touch, reconnect, have a moment only to themselves. He kept a hand on Sam's cheek, circled his thumb like he wasn't aware it was happening, one eye a shadow and the other reflecting the stars.

Sam swayed closer, made a fist, and the amulet bit into his knuckle.

Their hips knocked and he shivered, and Dean just kept staring. Sam's eyes fluttered closed and he let himself be weak, just a moment, rested his head on Dean's shoulder as Dean's coat flapped around them in the prairie wind. He took a long breath, tilted so he could see the bulky shapes of the horses, swore the crow that'd chased him swooped over the fire then disappeared into the grass.

Imagined or not it impelled him, set his resolve. He couldn't be reluctant any longer, knew that Dean wouldn't go through with this if he showed any resistance. Sam gathered, then pushed away, hands on Dean's chest framing the amulet, expression nothing but determination.

"I think you should go first." Sam could see the violent glow orange embers reflected in what he now knew was a brand in the fire.

Dean started to protest but Sam shook his head, rapped his fist on Dean's sternum.

"I'll do it, I have to I know, but Dean," Sam licked his lips, then laid open, "I can't do better than that. You can. I trust you to be hurting with it and still able to keep steady, not hurt me or mess it up."

Dean studied him, loathe to have this done or to do harm to Sam, relented with a sigh, smoothed his hair a last time, agreed. They shifted apart without wanting to stray after breaking their hold, stripped down to their pants and boots in grim silence, windswept thrush fluttering and whispering against the inky sky and the slowed huffs and grinds from the horses. Then they settled next to the fire, faced one another.

Sam smiled when Dean just let the amulet hang down his back instead of taking it off, then they sat together, fiddled awhile all nervy and dread.

"Where should we put them?" Sam dragged the water even closer and draped torn off strips of cotton from a ruined shirt over Dean's shoulder.

"Maybe--here." Dean didn't say it like a question, said it like he'd already decided. He pointed to his chest, over the heart. "Wanted to say arms, maybe shoulder, not as tender there. But riding and fighting tomorrow with these is going to be tough enough as it is--at least here we can bandage, and it doesn't have to move as much."

"Won't show, either," Sam agreed, as if sometime in the distance well past this upcoming fight was a certainty to them.

He tried to suppress the thrill at Dean's suggestion, that they'd carry this in a place so intimate, a secret between them.

Dean flattened Sam's hand against him, held right where Sam was eying to make the brand. The horses crunched grass, pungent and green, and the wind died to a thread then the fire popped.

Sam jerked at the sound. "How'd you know to make this?"

"You know well as I do." Dean looked at the brand, quirked a grin. "It's just the wards and protections we learned. I put the strongest of those together, best I could, but it's still crude--probably gonna be ugly."

Nothing to be done about that, and Sam didn't mind. He wanted to wear this pattern of symbols Dean had chosen from Dad's journal and what they'd learned over their years, as he'd done with the gun, vital proof of their work together to try and save one another, themselves.

Sam cleaned Dean's skin with a generous spill of whiskey and one of the rags, then patted Dean's side. "Good enough. You ready?"

He wasn't, not at all, but they couldn't put it off any longer.

"Expect so. Can't hurt much worse than getting shot." Dean laughed hollowly then tapped tapped Sam's wrist, face a contortion of concern and mawkish abstraction in the firelight. "Just a few seconds okay? Won't take long. This ain't cowhide."

Sam stared at the handle of the brand, considered it and their positioning a moment, then he went to his knees. Dean steadied his hips while Sam undid his belt, slipped it loose then free and folded it a few times, and they went breathless for a moment.

"Here," Sam said, after shaking back into himself, shoved his belt in Dean's mouth. "Don't want to spook the horses." He settled in the vee of Dean's legs, butt at Dean's knees, both legs outstretched to bump up and over Dean's in the other direction.

Dean grumbled but clamped down, put a hand on Sam's thigh as Sam pulled the brand from the fire, and Sam could feel Dean's trembling. He stayed his own trembling, opened his eyes widely, hugely as he could, stared and stared at the fixed point where the brand would go, tried to imagine doing this. The distance to Dean's chest, the seconds he'd count once in contact, how to ignore the sizzle and stench and Dean's pain.

He turned his mind away from what this actually was, thought of this like a job, any other of their jobs, terrible and as no one should ever face, but necessary. Sam locked his elbows and held on, both hands, lowered the brand with resolute increments.

Dean had been right--no surprise--and the instant the brand touched flesh it went to work, seared and hissed. Sam measured in his mind _one-- two--_ , then he drew back, dropped the brand back into the fire.

He let himself shake, now, hurried and poured water over the burn, tried to staunch the heat and stop it from burning more. When he splashed it with whiskey Dean choked and kicked and bruised Sam's thigh but neither failed. Sam mixed the poultice to a paste, all the while leaning close to blow on Dean's chest, soft and steady, trickled it with more rock-cold water then he smeared half of the paste on a cotton strip and let it dangle, then rest, on the brand.

Dean's face was drawn and wet with pained tears. Sam dried them wordlessly, eased the belt from Dean's teeth, then without hesitating he braced himself, bit down on the belt with a brave smile and nodded.

He didn't want to look or know or think about it at all, was completely fixated on the circle of captured fire as it drew streaked, burning lines in the dark, across his eyes like the sun, then his skin. The pain was tremendous, stinging and brutal and it hurt so much his body reacted to numb the horror, replaced with jittery energy and a roaring rush of drowning pleasure. Sam whimpered, knees drawing up, fingers digging into the backs of his legs to keep himself from moving or clawing at the burn, and he could barely hear Dean over the roar.

Almost immediately the roar began to subside, but it'd seemed he'd been trapped in it for years. He could only just feel the water on his skin, Dean's gentle touch, the cooling thickness of the poultice.

Sam's eyes bolted open when he felt Dean's lips on him, kissing next to the hurt, here, there, then up his neck, hands soft and apologetic on his ribs, caressing his arms, slicking the sweat of exertion and pain. Sam hadn't known he'd closed his eyes, wasn't certain that they were fairly seeing Dean so near and wonderfully vital.

Dean's mouth landed, light and aching, on Sam's, and Sam had to concentrate to make his hands let go of their rigid grip. He reached out, made Dean meet his questioning gaze.

"Sorry," Dean murmured, still touching Sam tentatively, "sorry, I'm sorry."

For the kiss, the brand, the endless necessity of exhaustion and sorrow ever since the werewolf hunt--maybe everything they'd ever been and had known--Sam wasn't sure. But he denied, wasn't sorry because everything they were was saved in this, plunged his hands to tangle in Dean's hair, dragged Dean to him and into a deeper kiss.

The rush and roar of pleasure hadn't completely ebbed and the brand throbbed, heat and trembling in Sam's belly to stem his whole being that had nothing to do with pain, Dean eclipsing it all. An inevitable, inexorable, plotted course Sam was exultant to surrender within.

They fumbled, knocked and groaned, recoiled and cursed when fingers strayed over the burns, kissed sloppily and full of a hunger so finally, wonderfully appeased. Dean's pant stays were stubborn, knotted mysteries to Sam's overeager hands, Dean no help leaning in to suck on his neck then the point of his jaw as he tried to get the knots to unravel.

He grunted, pulled sharply and they gave, sat up and fit his hips to Dean's, straddled Dean's lap, and Dean held his hips and pulled him even closer. Sam angled so his ribs pushed into Dean's chest, just beneath the brand, and Dean's hand traveled to cup his shoulderblade, Sam's brand burning as if fit back into Dean's palm.

Dean was hard and slick against Sam's belly, long and impatient and full, twitched and trembled when they twisted just right so heat of Sam's cock smeared then rubbed alongside.

Sam started rutting forward, movement beyond his control or thought but perfectly in tune to Dean's, and what they needed. Dean bit his seeking fingertips, the sensitive bend of his wrist, the skin stretching to the indelible mark Dean had made on him.

He was fascinated with Dean's brand, traced just outside its lines, chanced to stray over the scar and to the center.

"Fuck," Dean choked, nails digging into Sam's back, hips lifting powerfully to entice Sam to repeat that stray touch once more, then again.

Sam tilted back more, sped and strained and filled with so much want he thought he'd split from the skin right at the sear of the brand, Dean's hand there behind it. He swayed back in, thunked his forehead to Dean's, clutched Dean's jaw and Dean held him there to ride, mouths barely touching in a gasping kiss. Then Sam raked his hand down, over Dean's brand, got as much of their cocks fisted in his hold as he could, jacked them together, and a wild, unrestrained shout escaped him when he came.

He vibrated, dizzied, wrenched and wheezed and Dean was right there--coming, anchoring, needing--with him.

Sam shivered when the breeze tickled the sweat from his back, and he smiled sleepily, nuzzled in beside Dean's nose, and Dean held him, didn't say sorry again or even try.

Dean hooked Sam from him, kissed Sam a last time, and Sam helped when Dean cleaned them briskly, did up his underthings and the button fly, forgot about the belt. They had no choice, no luxury to reveal the other for exploration to indulge and linger.

They drained their canteens, bandaged the brands, stole kisses and shared tastes and the eerie, icy-blue impossibly visible light just beneath where the dome of the sky met the jut of the horizon told it wouldn't be long before dawn would find them.

Sam lay quiet for a moment, mind a tumultuous riot of all that euphoria come down, satiety, pain, a sudden fear for tomorrow and what would befall them. That this would be stolen mere hours after having been discovered. His bravery faltered, tried to spike into breakaway irrational rage, but then Dean stretched out on their bedroll, tugged Sam into him, and all doubts and undercurrents were instantly calmed, fled.

Dean boosted them a bit, had a long pull from the whiskey, gave it to Sam. Then they situated, mindful of the brands and oversensitivity, ended with Sam pillowed on Dean's arm, body curled to fit close.

"Wish," Dean started, swallowed heavily.

Sam tucked in the bend of Dean's neck, drew lines around the fraying bandage. "What?" he asked, quieter than the stars.

"Next time I'll make sure we can take off our boots." Dean shook his head, shot a breath like he didn't know how else to say it, but that there was so much more intended.

Sam laughed, nodded and agreed, tried to ignore the persistent itch and residual burn that seemed to spread his body through. Next time only was the only thing Sam would ever need.

He made himself attenuate, listened, carefully. Drew on his memory of and building confidence with the strange power growing inside him. He listened--Dean's heartbeat, the horses' sleeping breaths, the wind that was bringing in clouds. Nothing stirred, nothing threatened.

"Can we sleep? I mean both of us, together. Really sleep." Sam asked, wet from the drink and slurred with fatigue and lassitude met.

Dean blinked, eyelashes tickling Sam's temple, and he mouthed a line of kisses across the top of Sam's head. He let out a long sigh, held Sam to him tightly, stretched out his other arm to close his hand around the shotgun he'd left in reach.

"Yeah. We can do that."

  


_a gun_  


Sam had always been an early riser, easy and eager to greet dawn, to peaceably keep company with the particular quiet only those protracted hours offered. New mornings had an optimism, a promise, and in the course of Sam's life, the most likely when they'd all survived another hunt and another day.

Dean was a grump in the mornings, slow and pissy and barely willing, usually had to be propped on his horse with a mug of coffee and the threat to truss him to the saddle like pack feed.

The past several mornings wasn't their life, so far as Sam decided. Knew--fate, fatalism--it's what their lives were becoming instead. Wouldn't change this morning for anything, despite having woken to Dean already up and having them ready to ride.

They'd hunkered over the remnants of the fire, ate cold bacon and a slug or two of whiskey, checked bandages, then had nothing more than to push on, and on, same as had mercilessly driven them since Dad disappeared.

But there'd been Dean's arm around Sam's shoulders, tucking him close to lean in as they breakfasted. Sam able to prowl his hands over Dean, draw them into a kiss, a third, Dean tugging him back for a last before he climbed onto Blue. Dean watching him as they rode, vigilant as ever, but with a hooded expression of banked heat and long-hidden wanting at last shown.

Their route had kept them in the salt deposits until the sun was past noon, allowing them to give full attention to hastening their way, rather than worry about what might be coming even faster behind them. But already they were almost to the southwest spoke they'd take to approach Magnificent, and it was nearly beyond Sam to comprehend all they'd changed and all that had become in the past few days, all started with a simple werewolf hunt.

If Bobby got Dean's cable, he or he and Rufus would wait them out on that southwest entry, same as they did anytime the group went their ways and later reunited. Sam hoped by then he could hide his own fully ignited pull and hunger for Dean, and hide that some part of him might just might be turning monstrous.

A line of buildings had showed itself several miles back, far enough yet to seem like a miniature envisioning of what a frontier town should be, close enough Sam could sense the pall hung over it like coal fire.

They diverted to a hillock stood thick with oak and creeper vine and underbrush, tied up on the far side. A brace of grouse lived up to their name as they were flushed from the dense greenery, heads bobbing low as they belly-ran and warbled their way through the grass in search of undisturbed shelter.

Sam peeled from his coat and left it to lie folded over his saddle, rolled and buttoned his sleeves above his elbows. He untied their canteens and slung them over a shoulder, patted his way from between the horses, felt along their legs and sides, checking for any discomfort or heat. Not too far back, they'd passed the telltale silver line of a snake creek showing itself in the clumps of grass and bramble.

Dean pulled his thumb the other direction, and Sam nodded; they'd go their ways, be on the lookout for any sign of trouble, Bobby and Rufus, and hopefully Dean would return with something to eat. And don't you be gone too long.

He tickled foxtails and columbine as he walked, palms flat and plated out from his hips. Felt good to stretch his legs and shoulders, but his gaze was restless and his mind weary. His visions hadn't helped with anything but to drag them along, point to futile point, and his power seemed powerless most times. Then there was the worst and what made him weakest--the fear and idea that anything could happen to Dean.

Sam relived the canyon wall failing, the landslide, stared into emptiness and begged god or anyone who'd listen that it was only a false premonition. Wasn't sure he could believe they'd be so lucky as to make it out alive.

If not, it'd happen because of him. If Sam was who survived, he'd see he didn't hold on very long after making sure everything that touched Dean had paid.

Sam toed the grass clear of the stream, checked for actual snakes or anything else unpleasant better not to surprise, washed his neck and face and arms. He cupped his hands on his thighs, contemplated the line of Magnificent in the rippling heat of the dying day. He imagined leaving Dean and the canteens behind, walking there instead and striding into town, laying waste to it with a single thought.

This imagined picture jerked, squelched, replaced with flickering white-blue light.

The ground split beneath. Roil of inky black clouds, bunch and thin of their own volition. A lock no man could break and the blaze roaring to an inferno that should have ended it giving all new life. Blood on his shaking hands. Triumph in that depravity, power filling that blood, sizzling, ready, no longer raw. Hand outstretched, hand in a fist, close his eyes to savor the dark throttle.

Sam's hand slipped from his leg and he plunged forward into the water, broke the thrall, and he gasped at the cold and the sudden return. He straightened his arm, pushed himself up and sucked wind, watched the dance of his fractured reflection, how it made his eyes yellow from the sky in its gloaming. He shook his head, wiped his face, wiped the tingling prescience and clenching fear aside.

When he straightened, Crow was there, tucked in the grass to be able to look right into Sam's gaze, unblinking and silent.

"Oh, what do you want," Sam muttered, hunched, hid in his shoulders and his hat, filled the canteens. He stood and turned away, but Crow matched his steps with short lifting flights, to land again in front of him.

Sam made half-turns and ridiculous patterns in the field, tried to avoid and elude, but each step Crow was there, then staring at him, waiting for his next move.

After he'd had enough he swung one of the canteens in two sharp loops, let it fly. It barely missed Crow and Crow squawked, ruffled and hopped. Sam laughed, sharp and mean, but when he leaned to pick the canteen back up his periphery caught a shape bigger and more substantial than anything he should be near.

On instinct he dropped, flattened in the grass. Sam jerked a look over his shoulder and Crow was just behind him, preening indolently.

"Fuck you," he bit, folded his arms over himself, pressed his face to the ground to hide, hesitated at moving lest he'd been seen.

Crow's game had taken him to within shouting distance of the back line of buildings in Magnificent, and the town rose up ahead of him like a spectre, a terrible harbinger. This close, Sam could sense its unrest, its hideous transformation, and the aftermath was disquietingly familiar.

Sam could feel its pull, its beckoning promise. Rush in, annihilate even its memory from the earth. Rush in, have its dark sway consume him instead.

He moved his hand, so warm and sweaty the heat soaked through his shirt, the bandage, itched at his brand. Sam traced the shape that'd burned to him with a fingertip, didn't have to move or see it to know its form, and he smiled, thinking about Dean's tongue poked to the side in concentration, sketching the design at Ellen's before forging what would become theirs, indelibly.

Sam pushed up, at that, rolled back into his haunches. Crow fluttered in front of him, agitated and persistent, tugged his hair, tilted its head meaningfully towards town.

But that wasn't what Sam needed, wasn't his path, wouldn't lead his right way. Sam swatted Crow, heavy and purposeful, heel-walked in quick, awkward escape while Crow was dazed.

He was near the horses and Dean's searching eyes found him, studied him head to toe, landed to hold his stare and he lifted the canteens in a low shrug, smiled.

Dean nodded, then pressed a finger to his lips, lifted his chin sideways.

Sam looked over, understood. Tied in beside Colt and Blue were two other horses. Bobby and Rufus had come.

He and Dean met where Blue was tethered, Dean cupping his hands in a well while Sam poured off half of a canteen. Blue sucked at the water, nipped Dean's fingers and Dean grumbled.

"Be nice, you mule. You might think Sammy loves you best, but that just ain't so. Meaning, I win."

Sam scratched Blue's forelock affectionately, waited a beat but Blue was done, then they tried to coax Colt to drink, not quite so accustomed to the practice as he and Dean had trained their horses.

Dean's smile from teasing Blue--and Sam--disappeared, thoughts obviously lost back with Buck. Sam hipped into Dean and Dean pressed back, then when more water was being wasted than anything he slapped a hand wetly at Sam's neck, dragged them to the smokeless fire that Bobby had a knack for teasing.

They had indeed brought coffee, and Dean tugged Sam down beside him, settled cups into their hands.

Rufus let them each get all of a swallow then he stood. "To be perfectly rude, it's good to see you boys whole and kicking, but if we want half a chance at scratching through, I should get on to setting some ideas I have for taking out a whole bunch of demons at once."

Sam _pfft'd_ a breath. "Damnit, Rufus. Not even a howdy first?"

"Howdy." Rufus fingered his hat and smiled grimly. "I meant that, it is good to see you. But also if I'm going to save our asses from roasting, I can't waste time here while Bobby frets all over you."

Just like Rufus to be that way, and just like Sam to enjoy talking to Rufus maybe the most of any of them aside from Dean.

Rufus tugged his chestnut up from cropping everything green within reach, stepped into the saddle. "Hope to see you on the other side, too." He didn't wait for a reply, and started west towards the blind of a crop of sandhills.

"Better he goes," Dean offered. "They've been bickering like wives since getting here."

Sam popped his hand under Dean's cup, snorted when coffee sloshed onto Dean's face and Dean opened his legs and jittered to avoid getting it in his lap. Dean retaliated by freeing a hand and knuckling down Sam's spine, letting four fingers slip under the waistband of Sam's trousers. Sam lost a breath but didn't try to twist away, and Dean curled a smug smile into his next swallow.

"You kids done?" Bobby groaned to sit across from them, was filthy with days on a hard trail. His wide-brimmed hat hung tiredly, flopped tucked behind his ears, brim in front flipped up against the crown. He got them more coffee. "There's every chance this'll kill us, you realize."

Dean's fingers curled against Sam's skin, snared into the tucked-in layers of Sam's shirt hems.

"You say that every morning, Bobby." Dean shook his head shortly, set his cup to the side, leaned enough away so it didn't look like he had that hold of Sam. They'd always sat that close anyway.

Bobby frowned. "Yeah, but this time it's actually true." He looked at Sam. "Got most of what you've been up to from Dean, but I'll ask you straight. You holding up?"

"I'm fine." Sam's answer was quick, force of habit. They all smiled knowingly--anything but and otherwise--but it was good enough.

"Wish I had time to ask you boys more, let you take watch while I sleep." Bobby glanced at the disappearing dot of Rufus almost blended with the land. "He's going around, then we can split ways how we're going in--right, left, middle. With only four, a plan of attack ain't so much a plan as a fallback."

"I'll take the middle." Sam didn't check with Dean.

Bobby hummed in agreement. "Whatever you like. Trouble will find all of us, all the same." He slid his gun from the holster, laid it in his lap, shucked the bullets then he broke it down, started fiddling its parts to make certain the whole would be sound. "You learn anything about your daddy?"

Sam pursed his lips, hated the tension that ratcheted Dean at the question. A skiff of finches were busy in the field, clustered on a spindly sapling, fluffed, were off again to the next soon as the wind shifted a branch. This is where Sam wanted to be, and Dean who he needed to fight alongside, but he wondered at if he'd slid into Andy's cowardice out of fear he'd turn killer instead.

He thought about the tin box. The gun they'd built. The yellow-eyed devil nipping on their heels. The feather still in his pocket.

Pieces of something, not even clues, and none had led them to their father, and if they were supposed to, Sam hadn't been able to make sense of how.

Their silence answered Bobby's question. He tugged a kerchief from a pocket, funneled it in the gun barrel, started talking so they didn't have to.

"Not even a full day after you were gone we found ourselves stumbling on something likes I'd never seen before. Rufus either--can never tell about Caleb. Just a girl, about your age, pretty little thing. She'd come to one morning, went visiting next place over where her intended lived, found him dead.

"She went crooked after that, lost all sense of reason, saying she had nothing left and blamed those closest to them for his killing. Ended up somehow being able to summon demons--beasts, something--dispatched them and her _dearly beloveds_ , then some townsfolk, by her will."

Sam leaned back, as if he could be affected less by that incremental distance. Another, then. Another like him gone crazy. He chewed on his lip and started bouncing a knee, but Dean's free hand closed around it, patted, and Sam nodded, stilled.

Bobby gave him an upraised brow, didn't comment. He snicked the chamber from the gun, ticked it all six counts, made sure the action was smooth.

"There wasn't much left of anyone by the time we got there, and precious less of her once we'd done. An exorcism worked, but not not kindly." Bobby looked away, didn't like that memory, closed his eyes to it. "Thing is, I suspect she'd killed him, without knowing what she'd done. Lashed out in the night, somehow. Drove her ‘round the bend, all the same."

"Whatever she'd brought about was still there, lurking. Took hold of Caleb, infected him. Suddenly he was raving on how he knew where you were, that we should stop you before it was too late. Put me and Rufus out of commission then hared off on his own."

Dean's reassuring touch on Sam's knee turned into a vice. "He found us all right."

Bobby paused in his work.

"We left him dead," Dean said, flat and stinging like a switch.

"I see." Bobby carefully inspected his bullets, slotted six in their turn, in their place. "Wasn't until we got your wire we had any idea what next. Caleb had somehow left no trail, and not like we'd get anything from what remained of that girl and her kin." He shrugged. "After that, though, following along up here was pretty easy, finding you, seeing as how there's a direct line of lightning storms, cloudless twisters and the land going sour leading unerringly out from Magnificent over there."

Sam wondered why they hadn't seen any hail, ruin, even rain. He wondered if somehow he'd kept the sky at bay.

Bobby finished with his gun, sighted it, hummed in satisfaction. He pocketed it back in the holster. "I ain't gonna say you two should have just waited, that morning, kept on with us. If it weren't for finding that girl we might not have ever been turned around, then have our minds turned to what might be going on with you and your daddy. I don't mean anything hard by that, just how things are."

Dean started to say something, but Bobby held up a hand.

"Just know we don't begrudge you going. And me and Rufus--we're glad to be here now." He grinned, suddenly, laughed a bit. "Yer damn lucky we showed, too. Can't think what you two would look like, on your own in a fight with a town full of devils."

Sam's answering smile spared, at the word. He pulled up in his chest, eyes earnest. "Bobby, I--"

"We, Sam," Dean said tightly, stole a hard, punishing pinch into Sam's side. "We met a few like that girl, getting here. Not quite the same but with the same sad end."

Bobby nodded, looked like he thought he understood what might have been hard about that for Sam to try and muster be said. Wrong, of course, because Sam had been about to spill that he was touched with the same, had been diverted as Dean intended, thought Sam had grief and discomfort of seeing innocents slaughtered and once good people felled.

The finches had moved on and the sun was nothing but a finishing glimmer of brass spilling over the lip of the horizon. Bobby slapped his knees, stood.

"We should get on, give us enough light to ride hard and fast towards town. From there--I don't know. Say your prayers."

Dean brought Sam up with him, held out an arm to Bobby, and they gripped forearms, held on. "Bobby, thanks. For making it, for coming at all. For not needing more than that to be willing to."

Bobby let go, patted Dean's shoulder. "Least I could do, after mistakenly thinking you'd learn a lesson on this goose chase. Or could fend for yourselves." He turned to Sam. "That goes for you both."

They shook on it, too, the same clasp of hands to forearms, more than a handshake. More final and stolidly reassuring than an embrace.

As Bobby saddled up, he tossed them each a leader of tight-packed powder bombs.

"Blessed iron and hunks of jet. We've no idea if they'll do anything to the demons, but at least it'll slow the meat jackets down." Bobby flipped the front of his brim back down, gave the boys a long look. "Be careful. And this kind of fight--save a last bullet for yourself."

Dean saluted and Bobby left with that, chased towards Magnificent and the shadows that crept ever-longer across the plains.

"They didn't know anything about Dad either, did they." Sam didn't wait for Dean to respond, already knew Bobby and Rufus hadn't any more idea than they.

John Winchester had just disappeared. That might be the most anyone ever learned of it.

Sam walked to Blue, looped the string of small, crabapple-shaped bombs where he'd had in mind, dangling down one side, gave it a tug. Worked. That way he wouldn't get snagged having to turn and fire, but the bombs would be easy enough to reach down and grab.

Of course, he'd probably have to light them from his teeth, that after sparking a match. Might be best of all to light up the whole thing, toss it in somewhere.

He grabbed to haul himself onto Blue but then Dean had his elbow, whipped him right back around, pulled them together, crushed him in and Sam protested, stuffed his arm between their chests.

"Ow," Sam reminded, fanned his hand just touching the lump of bandaging under Dean's shirt. Dean relaxed, didn't let go. "Was just going to get settled, not ride off without a goodbye."

"Say goodbye like this," Dean murmured, tangled fingers in Sam's messy ponytail and breathed along Sam's neck.

Sam pushed his reach under Dean's coat, and their hats tilted, bent at the brims, met to shade them from the rapidly setting sun. It was the last they might have for doing this, until after the fight, until maybe forever.

"Know you said you can't get me to do things, like Andy had, but what you did to the demon in Caleb--can you do that again?"

Sam shook his head. "I'm not sure."

What he'd managed to do had been passive, attuning to Dean's heartbeat after the landslide, and mostly happenstance of being able to sense others' powers with his own. The few times he had been at some kind of strength were purely reactive, but so wildly uncontained Sam hadn't learned from its use or honed any ability.

"Hmmm," Dean considered. "Well. I hope you can."

Sam shivered, violently, everything from the start of this flaring in recall with overwhelming demand. The homestead, Andy's pathetic existence--then that girl, Jake--all gone mad in their ways, turned promise to ruin.

Dean tightened his arms around Sam. "That's not going to happen to you, Sammy. Not so long as I'm here."

Of course, he'd know Sam's fears, knew Sam better.

Sam fit them closer. He shut his eyes, curve of Dean's neck perfectly cradling his forehead, skimmed his hands around Dean's hips. He realized--he didn't have to think this over, or imagine it, wishing it'd be so.

"I know."

That, absolutely, Sam was sure of, and sure of it being true.

They held on another moment but that's all as could be spared, left one another arm's trailing and hands reluctant, obligated all the same.

Dean cupped Sam's cheek, kissed him, short and dry and everything. Sam kissed Dean, harder and with a quick reach of his tongue, wanted so bad to get carried away. But felt like soon as it started Dean moved, kissed the corner of Sam's mouth, Sam's temple, the pulse shielded under Sam's jaw.

"Damn boots," Dean breathed, rocked back on his heels, tried to make light.

Sam cast a glance at the fall day, sun winking out, revealing a sickle crescent moon arcing into Magnificent's rising peaks. A huge black bird glided in flight, eclipsed the moon's light, then was lost to the dark.

The dark became a tunnel, and Sam the key. He opened a gate, the gaping maw of an abysmal mouth, that nightmare world of cloudless, bloody sky and all those screams.

"Sam?"

He blinked, vision clearing, stared at Dean. Sam stammered, and Dean searched his eyes. Clearly could tell he'd been shown something, but didn't ask.

There was no more prolonging this, no prevention to take. Sam smiled and Dean smiled, and they found they couldn't bring themselves to actually say goodbye. Dean mounted Colt, gave Sam a last look and a nod. He spurred in and Colt started running, wheeled to the right flank, trail dust kicked from Bobby's horse arrowing left graying below the strengthening moon. Sam watched, took in a long breath, and Dean blurred from being distinguishable in the dim.

Blue started even as Sam's leg was swung around, and he settled, galloped low and hard and steady, headed them for the center approach of town. He drew his pistol, stuck his knife between his teeth, hip-cocked his shotgun with the reins looped to an angle from his hand.

Sam entered Magnificent between the church and the livery, and there was no opportunity to do any different than rush headlong. The fight met him immediately.

Gunshots rang, the piercing twang and breaking glass or splintered wood or wet rattle that followed. Smoke billowed from the low-stack jailhouse at the end of town Bobby had taken, and Sam ignored the wails from inside.

If there was anyone here left that wasn't possessed, Sam wasn't sure that, after living with demons for however long, any of them would want to be left alive. Beyond that, there was no time for mercy, no quarter, no hesitation to spare.

For Sam, the battle was controlled chaos, similar to so many others from his entire life behind him, but fraught with so much greater importance and possible repercussion.

Those who'd once been townsfolk here attacked from all sides, most physically, some with guns, most with whatever'd make a good weapon they could find. Sam and Blue darted among the fray, and Sam squeezed off shots, kicked out, ended up having to cleave the arm from a woman's remains and sink her chest in with blessed silver buckshot.

She recoiled far enough for them to escape, lurched in grisly animation still once they'd freed. She wasn't the only maimed-but-driven-on by the demon inside, and wildly, strangely, Revelations tore though Sam's mind at this sight of the walking dead.

Blue charged and rent of his own decision, and Sam trusted that, kept in the saddle and kept firing. Tried not to be distracted with the want to find Dean, relentlessly searched the manic, macabre orange-and-red firelit scene for any trace.

Sam did his best to summon his ability--to find it and close around it and make it his--send it after the demons like he had with Caleb. It split his attention, dangerous in such a situation as this, and he felt his nose pop-tickle, then itch, knew it'd started to bleed.

He finally let the evasive threads slip his grasp, too difficult and too risky to continue wasting effort after, but he huffed at himself with impatience, disappointment.

Sam pressed his knee into Blue, circled them towards the watertower that teetered above the hotel at the center of town. Rufus was pinned on one of the blunt balconies of the third floor, let off one of the powder bombs and scattered most of those surrounding him.

Rufus started to climb to the roof but a demon grabbed him from inside, through the window.

Sam sighted an arm with his rifle, and it shattered at the elbow, enough for Rufus to kick loose and escape.

He and Blue danced in place and Sam wondered where Rufus left Jebediah, and could Rufus make the jump from that high and land on a horse.

Moments after Rufus had scuttled up the shingling, the deafening crack of dynamite whumped through the air, echoed back and forth between the buildings. The watertower listed, heaved unevenly forward, then it gave. Its side bashed into the roofline, squealed its iron bandings and the wooden slats bent or broke, enough for the pointed top to jostle then drop.

Water rushed into the street, poured and filled the wagon ruts and pitfires, and every demon it encountered started to burn.

Rufus emerged at the pitch of the hotel, tipped his fingers to Sam then he lowered, hunkered in, started sniping the writhing demons one at a time.

With the street clearing, the fight spread but thinned, and Sam leaned to Blue's neck and raced them past the puddles of holy water and wreckage, intent on what looked to be a mercantile, two-story, demons holed up inside. Best use he could think of for the powder bombs.

As he crossed the mouth of an alley that pocketed back into a dark corner, something flashed. Something yellow, brighter than fire, luminous and eye-level to a person.

Sam set his jaw and pulled up sharply on Blue, slowed them to high-step into the alley, and he prickled, cocked the hammer on his gun.

He dropped from Blue, so the horse could guard the narrow opening into the alley, and crept towards the darker reaches, cursed that he didn't have a torch or even a strip to light. From nowhere, the man who had appeared to Sam in the street in Pinchbeck stepped in front of him, lit unnaturally. Before Sam could react, the man snapped his fingers.

All sound, all rank odor, all everything of the battle and Magnificent was gone.

"You are a very stubborn, unreasonable young man."

Sam whipped around, had aimed and was ready to fire that quickly, stayed his shot when his gaze was drawn to the man's hand, still in that _snap_ outstretched, a single black feather at attention gleaming between thumb and finger, the moon here away from the crowd and shadow of town enough to see by.

"That was _you_?"

"Hmmph." The man--Crow--shrugged. "Don't be angry, darlin'. You've resisted me at every step. I hate to rely on drastic measures, but as you've made obvious, nothing else is going to do."

Sam kept his gun trained on Crow, glared. "I thought you were--"

"Oh, him!" Crow rolled his eyes. "Nope. I'm not yellow eyes--Azazel, if you were curious. I'm not on his side. I'm not even a demon!" Crow gestured widely, palms opening.

"You're not. Really." Sam breathed through his lips, let _Christo_ pass lower than a whisper.

Crow rolled his lips out exaggeratedly and shook his head. "Please. As I explained, not a demon. I'm even the good guy, sometimes. Helping Azazel, all this, just a means to an end, really. He's got some grand ambitions, same as the rest of us. My only interest is to see that end fulfilled, namely, by you. And that, of course, brings us here."

Here was a graveyard, no sign of anyone else around, not even a breeze. Sam's gut clenched when he thought about Blue, who'd stay in that alley, patient and loyal until Sam came. When he thought about the fight, Dean, and being made to abandon both.

The dome of the heavens was marred by an angry glowing stain, smear of firebrand colors harsh contrast against the velvet sky and icy prisms of the stars. Heat lightning that had started to fork above the violent glow, eerie dark clouds summoned from the streaks, the faint scent of sulfur in the air

Sam realized that was Magnificent, in the distance, burning down.

That meant he was in the cemetery Dean had known about, where all of this would begin or end.

"I don't care. Take me back." Sam could barely speak through his gritted teeth.

Crow laughed. "After all the work I've done? No."

Sam slid his thumb off the butt of his gun, let it spin at his finger wrapped in at the trigger. He holstered it, figured it'd do him no good. "I don't give a shit about you or your games. I won't play them, either. Now take me back."

Crow brought both his hands up, yapped them at each other. "This is hardly a game. I require change, for things to be wiped completely clean and started all over again, for something more for me to do than be a harbinger of death to some, deceit to others, destiny the rest. I'm tired of this, and you humans."

Sam narrowed his eyes. "Yeah? Well I'm tired of you."

Crow mused. "What's it matter? None to me."

"You're reprehensible," Sam spat, took a step back.

"No. I'm more powerful than Azazel and his minions could ever conceive, and neither good nor evil." Crow sighed dramatically. "But I am bound by certain, timeless laws. Give me a change, though, some new challenges, new creatures to mess with--I'll be happy for awhile, again."

Sam balled his hands to fists, that rage and his worry, the days of frustration, all building inside.

"Take me back to my brother. I don't know what you want but you're not getting it. Take me back then leave us alone."

Crow stepped in towards Sam, all humor and mockery gone, had hardened over with impatience for this tedium. "This is my gambit, and you're my ace. No one else was going to come through, and this is what I do, after all--guidepost lost souls back to their path. You've just been mule-headed and impossible, but this is what you were meant for, and if it requires an anvil, then an anvil is what you'll get."

Sam swooned, closed his eyes against an onslaught of dizziness. He had so much anger, so much doubt, so much pain.

"No!" Sam reached out and grabbed Crow's knotted silk tie, wrenched it in a ruined bunch in his hand. "No. I'm done with being dragged around, made to do, chasing after what everyone else wants."

"I don't care." Crow leaned in, smiled. "And you can't change that, or your destiny."

Sam drew his knife, plunged it into Crow's chest, just beneath the hold of his other hand. He drove it so fast, so hard, it even startled him, and it buried past the length of the blade to the leather-corded hilt.

Crow gasped, and a well of blood formed at the gape of the wound, built and heavied, and when it burst to spill across Sam's hand Crow screamed.

Body and bird converged, contorted, and Sam was thrown back onto the ground. Crow wheeled above him brokenly, wings sprouting from his back, tear of flesh and crunch of bone. Then Crow was rent in twain--four wings from two, two carriages from one--and they shrieked as they separated.

Sam stumbled to his knees, grabbed his knife, fallen during the wrenching metamorphosis. One crow gained rough flight, scolded angrily, snapped and stared with its fathomless black eyes. It swooped down over Sam, brush of its wing on Sam's cheek and sound of their vibrating sweep tickling his ear.

The second crow hovered serenely, effortless in a graceful hang, its eyes glinting turquoise blue. It regarded Sam a moment, then tipped into the wind, sailed the opposite direction towards Magnificent.

Sam stood, watched after it, stunned and weary and strangely relieved.

A single feather fluttered, twirled in a tight downward spiral to the ground, and when it hit, a crack opened between Sam's feet.

Sam huffed, long greedy breaths as if he'd run miles. He shouldered his shotgun, decided if nothing else, he could walk his way back to Dean. His first step faltered when the silhouette of a man appeared, connected to Sam along the crack the feather had made.

They faced each other like a stand-off, then recognition flooded Sam and he sheathed his knife, covered his mouth with his hand. Relief nearly bent him double.

"Dad--Dad!" Sam ran the short distance that separated them, eyes stung with tears and his throat so tight.

Dad smiled at him wearily, hard-bitten and scruffy, looking like every day they'd been apart had been without rest, without cease. They caught each other in an embrace, and Sam held on. After a few moments, Dad pushed him gently away, held onto his shoulders, studied him intently.

"We've been looking for you, ever since Slipshoe and the werewolves--Dean and me--we've been searching, so long, never gave up." Sam rolled his lips into his teeth, bit down, determined not to cry in front of his father.

Dad's eyes narrowed. "Where is Dean?"

Sam wanted to hear about Dad's relief. He wanted to be told Dad had been searching, too. He wanted answers.

His elation faded, found that same well-worn place of disappointment and bitter acceptance. Sam wrapped his hands around Dad's arms and squeezed lightly. "It's--good to see you."

"You boys find what I left for you?"

Sam thought about the gun, the arcane plans for making it a devil killer, their work in doing that, the throb above his heart that the brand still demanded. Nodded.

Dad stared at him, so intently. "Get it all done?"

"Yessir." Sam started to lose feeling in his fingertips, and dread began to thread his veins, the unforgiving pinprickling he'd learned so hard, that warned none of this was right.

"Good, that's my good boys."

There was something wrong. Indefinably, unerringly sinister wrong. Sam tried to step from Dad, found he couldn't move. He tightened his jaw and gritted, "I don't know where Dean is. And I don't have it."

Dad's eyes flickered yellow, mellowed to hazel again, then Dad blinked long and slow, met Sam's defiance with a blazing yellow-amber stare.

"Where's my father," Sam asked. "What did you do with him."

Azazel lingered in a long, thoughtful pause, then he shook his head sadly. "You really don't know, do you?"

Sam's strained, stony silence made him laugh.

"I'll try and make it quick. Johnny and I, we've got something of a history. I'm the reason your momma died. I killed her. Bet you didn't know that either." Azazel curled his lip, showed his eyetooth. "After that, reaping in the rest of you boys hasn't been that much of a challenge. Starting with dear old dad."

"You son of a--"

"Save it." Azazel waved his hand, imaginary touch kept Sam from speaking. "Here I am, nice enough to be the one who steps up, finally explains all this to you, and all you want is to call me names. You know what they say about the apple that falls--especially the bad one."

Azazel concentrated on Sam, stared him up and down with a thoroughness Sam could feel, gross and violating and stinging on his skin. Azazel growled, opened a hand in dismissive frustration, all pretense of kind solicitation gone.

"You might not have it on you, but I'll find it. Probably made the mistake of trusting it with that idiot brother of yours." Azazel chuckled, stepped so close Sam could feel his otherworldly heat, ran a thumb along the pulse in Sam's neck. "You Winchester boys, to the last, all so trusting of obedience. Your daddy traded for it, fair and square. Which means it's mine to double-cross and take back."

Sam fought to move, to even twitch, had started to sweat, couldn't feel it chill when the night wind raked past the graves.

Azazel stared pacing, looping around Sam in uneven circles, breathed at Sam's nape and shoulder. It was even more terrible to endure--this sickening presence, evil, its forced touch--hidden in the shape of Sam's father.

"It's funny though. Maybe my favorite part, in all this." Azazel swept Sam's hair back, undid the leather cord, let it fall. "Your daddy thought his soul was worth the saving and protecting of your lives. But he couldn't see any worth in ever telling his own sons the truth about their lives. Not even to soften the blow of his disappearing to whore himself to the devil."

Sam choked down the hold on him, ribs crushing with the effort to speak. "I won't listen to you. I won't tell you anything."

"No?"

"No. But I will." Dean stepped from behind one of the tortured, spindly trees that grew between the graves, had their father's gun aimed at Azazel 's head, unerring. "Let him go. Let them both go."

"Ahhhh, there you are!" Azazel laughed triumphantly. "Never a disappointment to your daddy, young Dean. Not like this one here." He curled two fingers under Sam's chin, tipped as if showing Sam off to Dean. "But I'm afraid, no dice, partner. These two belong to me now."

"The hell they do." Dean cocked the gun.

Azazel hooked two fingers in the air in a sly, threatening curl. He flattened his hand, palm away from them, looked at Sam with a serene terribleness. He tossed Dean back to crunch into a gravestone, then suspended Dean on tip-toe, tsk'd as he shook his head.

"Should have just made your shot. Still too worried about Daddy and doing what you're told, I see. But your daddy's mine, like I said. Paid me for the privilege, even." He winked at Sam. "I knew having this particular meatsuit to ride would come in handy."

Before Sam could even exhale, Azazel had wrenched the gun from Dean, caught it whipping towards him. He admired it, once-familiar pride turned to something foul and false.

"Look at this fine work you boys did." He smiled, ran the barrel along the corner of his mouth, tasted the powder at the muzzle. "But you know well as I, everything made intended only for good can just as easily go bad."

Azazel grinned, made Sam look at him, watch. He tilted the gun from his hip, flipped his other hand over the hammer, and fired sideways from between them.

The gun smoked and Sam could see the bullet as if it didn't move, suspended and twisting so slowly, the carvings he and Dean had made in silver and iron turned molten.

Dean called out--Sam's name, for their father, in defiance of the inescapable--then the bullet thumped into Dean's chest, threw him backwards.

Sam was unable to move.

Something bright sparked when the bullet met Dean's flesh, flared and momentarily caught fire, and Dean landed in a pitiful broken sprawl several feet from where he'd stood.

"There," Azazel said, didn't even bother to watch Dean fall, dropped the gun as well. "Now we're getting somewhere. I didn't want you boys to have this gun, and I don't need a gun at all. But I did need this."

Azazel lifted an eyebrow, as if to suggest look, watching is better than telling you. He opened his hand and the gun lifted, streaked through the air to lodge in the rusted, locked doors of the only mausoleum that stood here.

Sam kept trying to struggle. Remembered--the world splitting open, the blood on his hands, the need for a key. Sam screamed for Dean without being able to make a sound.

The air got heavier and the earth dragged him down, and the sky darkened suddenly in billowing roils, all gunpowder-green-and-steel like before a twister. He could only manage to draw back an arm, against the pressure and weight and hold of the demon, and punch Azazel.

"Shame." Azazel sounded almost hurt, feigned a pout, disappointment so achingly familiar on his father's face. "All those gifts and that's what you do?" He sneered. "All those gifts and that's the _most_ you can do?"

The wind screamed while hell itself clawed from the bowels of the world, freed because of them, because of his weakness, because of him.

"You can join me. Take your rightful place. Be with your father and lead, as you were meant to do. At last, give your old man a reason to be proud." Azazel caressed Sam's cheek, tucked a flyaway strand of hair behind Sam's ear.

"It's what you've always wanted. I could give that to you, I'm ready to share this. That same approval you've seen only given to Dean all your life. But you can stand beside me. It's your destiny, son."

The mention, the sum of these awful parts, was enough to make something untether in Sam, uncontained and barely controlled, fire in his core searing like a brain fever. The worst was the momentary temptation to give in, follow as Azazel wanted, let his despair and fury soothe the unforgiving, unsurvivable loss of Dean.

Sam blotted out everything. The vision of hell spilling forth around them. The taunting mockery wearing the visage of his father as a gruesome mask. The lies he'd been made to live a lifetime chasing.

Instead of giving in, surrendering to hopelessness, losing Dean gave Sam the greatest power of resistance, because with Dean gone, he had no other fear, and no other desire, and nothing to check the will to destroy everything that had hurt them.

Azazel threw his head back and laughed, _laughed_ , murmured something about liking that spirit. Sam let go, everything bottled in him exploding out and out.

Sam's rage and strength grew and he loosened his arm, twisted a hand until his nails bit into Azazel's jaw, couldn't stop the tears that rivered dirt from his cheeks.

Sam burned, and burned.

He pushed, harder and harder, could sense the air drying to crackle around them and the land begin to split. Sam clenched his teeth, tasted his own blood, but, still, there was a barrier, and Azazel continued to laugh. Sam was almost out of breath, energy, life, when Azazel abruptly let go. Sam rushed in, tore Azazel apart, and it felt like his own body split along with his attack, muscle from bone.

Sam burned hotter, watched a corona form, and his hands erupted into flames that ran his arms to meet at the brand on his chest--blinding, consuming throw of light and heat and he expanded, an inferno, decided to burn completely apart.

The cemetery, Azazel, earth and sky--it all lost color, blanked, went softly gray and silent.

He blinked, squinted into the quiet nothing, turned sharply when he heard the lightest flutter of wings, a deafening echo in this muted place.

Crow landed, shimmered then its wings folded behind. Crow grew before Sam into the shape of a man, plainly dressed in a tan canvas longcoat, white shirt and coarse trousers, with short dark hair.

"Hello, Sam."

Sam reared back, shocked at the sound of his name, expression wrinkling with incredulity.

All black was gone, now, Crow's eyes striking, piercing blue. He half-smiled. "I was relieved when you allowed me the opportunity to be freed."

This was the Crow he'd wrought, the one with the coal blue-black eyes and calm, implacable stare. As a man, it had the same, regarded him unblinkingly.

"What's going on?"

Crow smiled. "Your reward. The ending of this particular path, and learning that destiny is choice, and in all things, you have chosen."

"This...is a reward?" Sam looked around at the featureless blankness, made fists, but was powerless here.

This Crow, maybe bad as the first, and no better than the frustration of his father.

Sam flailed. "What about--the fight? And Azazel? The whole world?"

Crow continued to stand there, preternaturally still. "Don't worry about finding your way in the days that follow, Sam. You will know what best to do when it is time, so you have shown to this point, and so you will continue to do."

None of this made sense, and somehow Crow's fucking riddles were exactly as he'd imagined, in the dark, resolved shadows of his mind.

"Well then, is it over? Did I kill that bastard?"

Crow hummed musingly. "Yes and no, Sam. Just know that you won't be alone, in whatever more there is to come." He grinned. "You will enjoy your company, always have. It's what set you apart."

Sam could only boggle.

"But for now, you must rest."

"Rest? How am I supposed to rest when I don't even know what's--"

Crow touched two fingers to Sam's forehead and smiled, pushed gently, and a starburst of light rendered even this nothingness gone.

***

"Sammy? Sammy."

He pushed up through the fog, onto his elbows and ready to fight, only yawned deeply and turned back into the soothing warmth curled at his side.

"C'mon, wake up."

Something about the command made him want to answer, mix of desperation and everything vital shared on an endless stream between them. He opened his eyes to squint, smiled at Dean.

Smiled. At Dean.

Sam gaped, wondered if whatever he'd done in the cemetery had been too much, finished him, that maybe he'd been brought to Heaven.

It didn't matter, because he had Dean.

Sam tangled a frantic, eager hand in Dean's short hair, wrapped his other arm around Dean's shoulder, lifted himself and hummed when their mouths met, grinning and open.

He reveled in the taste and scent and everything so familiar and comforting and perfectly, only, his brother. Sam pulled Dean to him, on top of him, and Dean was caught off-center, landed down on Sam with an air-stealing whump.

Sam hissed. "Damn." Something on his chest strafed, burned like a new-healing wound. Sam grunted, peered up, cool evening sky showing itself past the strong cut of Dean's profile shadowed right next to him.

The brand. Clouds gone buttermilk mellow in a mundanely lengthening day. Dean's uncomfortable weight poking him, pinning him. Dean's heartbeat so steady and true.

"We're not dead?"

Dean laughed, tilted away enough to kiss Sam again, deep and sweet. "No. We're not dead." He traced Sam's eyebrows, down Sam's cheeks, smiled. Mostly content, shaded with bad memory and lingering worry. "Been having to wake you like that, a lot, of late. How about along with being able to take off our boots, we have a week or two where you don't keel over on me?"

"So long as you agree not to keep letting me think you have died," Sam said lightly, trembled in delayed reaction and dread for that he couldn't stay hidden.

Dean lowered and pressed their foreheads together, framed Sam's face in his hands. "Deal."

Sam protested when Dean pulled away, discovered he was parched past thirsty when Dean tilted a canteen to his lips. He gulped it nearly dry.

As Dean reached past Sam to drop the canteen, the placket of his shirt split, unbuttoned near to the waist, and Sam saw to understand how Dean had survived being shot.

There was a terrible burn on his chest, a snaking and spidering web of angry red with near char and a deep gouge at the center, balanced the brand. He was bandaged at his side and around his arm, bullet burns where Azazel's shot had glanced into him, put a furrow in his arm instead of going through at the heart.

Dean followed Sam's study of him, tugged at the cord around his neck and the amulet swung free, dangled over Sam. "Never thought this thing was magic, but it still sure enough managed a miracle."

The amulet was mangled, melted and shapeless, dented at its center and flattened towards the edges. Even uglier than when whole.

Sam ran a finger over it wonderingly.

"Dean," he breathed, awestruck and bemused, then he started to laugh.

He sat up more with Dean's help, leaned back on his saddle rested on the ground, their coats a bunch for a pillow. The cozy, easy warmth all the way to his toes told him he'd been snug in the bedroll for a time. The campfire was nicely banked, coffee pot tilted on a rock at its edge.

They were back in the salts, and Sam smiled when he found Blue, grazing calmly at the other side of the spring pond.

Sam licked his lips, counted in his mind. "How long have I been out?"

"Not long." Dean looked at the watery cast of light at the horizon.

"Hmm," Sam answered, allowed the understatement.

A crow flushed in from over the hillock, landed beside the fire. It strutted around comfortably, hopped over to preen on Dean's pack, chattered and pecked at a hunk of hardtack left there. Sam looked at it questioningly and Dean shrugged.

"He just showed up. I don't know, we got along and he stuck around. It was -- I liked the company."

Sam tried to decide if there was blue in those eyes, or if that was just a trick of the sunset.

"Dean?"

"Yeah."

Sam started fumbling with the blankets. "I gotta piss."

"I'll just bet you do." Dean let him struggle a minute, grinned.

They grappled him standing, and Dean got him walked a few shaky steps from camp, let him lean into Dean's steady hold while he went. Sam couldn't stop the low, relieved groan that escaped, and Dean snickered, nipped behind his ear.

Dean reached around, redid Sam's button fly, slid his palms opposite ways and covered Sam's hips, held them there a moment as they watched the sun decline its last, then the radiants and painting of rose and amber on the bellies of the clouds.

They hobbled Sam back to bed, and he looked across the fire, saw the crow had gone.

"He does that." Dean shrugged, tucked in behind Sam as Sam yawned, stretched, then yawned again.

Sam didn't think it quite fair that he'd only been awake a short while, and they hadn't done anything more than kiss, and already he was falling back asleep.

Part of him was full of a clamor of questions, demands to be answered. How had Dean found him? What of Magnificent and Bobby and Rufus? How'd they get here after? The better part of him was too lazy and appeased simply by having Dean with him, and he quieted most of the demands for the time being.

"The last thing I remember, really, is the gate had been opened." Sam drew in his brows, thought for sure if Hell on Earth had been spawned they wouldn't be lying here, peaceful in a spring-fed meadow. "What happened to all of that?"

"There'll be some for us to run down, so don't go thinking tomorrow's gonna be easy, but Sam," Dean propped on his elbow, combed Sam's hair with his hand, "Whatever you did--can maybe still do--you near wiped everything out. Even the cemetery is a scorched ruin."

Sam sighed out, nodded. He supposed that was so, sense of it having happened more like a few days later stumbling over the reminder of a dream.

"What about Dad?"

Dean stilled. "Gone."

With that single word, something in Sam released.

He remembered, then, like his visions from the blinding streak of days that led to them here. Same vivid colors, images snapping, everything seared with light. But this was controlled, allowed him to choose things to see, things to look at longer, things to push past.

The weight of Azazel's control leaving him. Sam's power rising, spiking to a rage. Dad's eyes yellow--blazing so hot they blazed out. The cool moment, green and kind, and _their father_ pushed past that veil of fire, resolute in a gladness that, if nothing else, Sam would overcome enough to kill this thing, end this revenge quest.

Sam felt their redemption, cherished the fleeting touch on his cheek.

Then Dad's skin cracking, fire growing from the sockets of his eyes, and it consumed him whole, burnt-back in a blowing rush away from Sam to disintegrate into ash, then gone.

Gone.

Sam could find no remorse for the death or his dealing of it. Their father had been dead since only months after Sam had been born, and what Sam had killed had been only a shell. "Gone" now wasn't missing, or disappeared, but at peace.

Something stuck in the memory, though, niggled, and Sam twisted to look at Dean. "I couldn't fight Yellow Eyes, just wasn't strong enough, no matter what I did. Then his strength went away, up and vanished, and I pushed right through."

Dean grinned, one corner of his mouth cutting a satisfied, darkly pleased dimple in his cheek. "After I went down, you just kept burning hotter, kept Yellow Eyes busy. I got the gun, shot that fucker in the head."

Sam blinked, then he grinned too.

"I'm glad I didn't--" Sam stopped short then wriggled his fingers, didn't know how to say _burn you alive with everything else_.

"Sammy, you ain't ever been able to whoop me. That isn't going to change, just because of a little, woo-woo." Dean mimicked Sam's wriggling, teased because it was over, Sam was still Sam, and they were together.

"When we head on, we should find a telegraph, send a line. Find out if Bobby and Rufus made it out, same as us. Hope so." Sam twisted their fingers, knotted them tightly, and Dean squeezed them in agreement. "What do we do now?"

Dean leaned in on Sam's shoulder. "We ain't far from where Mom's resting. Maybe we should start with putting a cross for Dad to rest with her."

Sam turned into Dean, nodded, kissed Dean's forehead.

Dean pushed at him, rolled them onto their sides facing the fire. "We'll go in the morning, early like you like. Head into the sunrise." He smiled against Sam's neck. "I stole Bobby's coffee."

"Sounds good." Sam breathed out, covered Dean's hand that'd crept up to fold over his brand, decided to watch the fire, stay awake for just a little while, enjoy Dean's drifting to sleep.


End file.
